6 runners, 4 walkers and a cyclist (not the set up to a joke, an actual fact!) made their way to Sparks to help get them ready for their first Birthday on Saturday.

Helen joined us for her first group run after deciding to see what the difference is between morning sessions at Windmill Hill, to the evening crowd in Queen Square!

We all converged in the alley behind Sparks and Lucy showed us to the toaster that we duly emptied, shifted 2 metres, them filled again!

NikFrancesMarianne and I, Vaguely Northern Darren, made light work of table and chair organising, before we all went upstairs and shifted some not very light stage sets. My first time using a trolley thing, also needing some extra wheels to shift it, taking around 6 people and a significant amount of time manoeuvering , before we found that 4 people (if one of the 4 is Valè, could actually carry it much quicker! The service lift was an experience, that if you weren't there, you wouldn't understand 'man'.

After realising the door somewhere wasn't shut properly, Jordan braved the 3rd floor on his own, and survived to close the door and get us moving again. Everyone worked hard tonight, including Frances and Richard working tirelessly at keeping the doors open.

Back downstairs at 7:45 for a quick group photo before Frances and Marianne spontaneously joined the GoodGym Eats crew, while Caroline stuck to her guns of never doing anything spontaneously in her life and ran home.

Thanks to Frances for the pun, honourable mention to Richard for 'Up down Junk'. [edit from Melanie (in Finland) - we definitely need to use that one!]

It was a double-header group run for Bristol GoodGym with the walkers heading to a different task than the runners!

The runners sprinted (at a jogging pace) over to St Werburgh's Community Centre for the first tidy up of the outside space this year - we're hoping to make this a regular task this year to get on top of the more pesky weeds. We think there was a yoga/relaxation class going on as people in one room were lying in the dark, otherwise we should probably have alerted someone...

The runners did say they could so with more tools there - asked for info to pass to the task owner, the on-chorus response was "snippy-snips" at which point Melanie realised that, much like parenting toddlers, its sometimes not useful to have used nicknames for items. It's both short and long snippy-snips desired - or secateurs and shears to is gardening professionals.

Meanwhile, the runners returned to the day-time Community Mission task beneficiary at Sparks to get a second coat of paint on the newly green and blue walls. With rollers and dodgy brushes, it was a much quicker start which was great as we'd have been needing to leave before Dave had managed to get the lid off the paint at lunchtime!

With both areas looking fabulously smart, it was time to RV back at Workout where there was speed-dating happening but we were all talked out.

Our second daytime foray to Sparks as traders are moving in, out and shaking it all about.

This time we were refreshing the area that had been hosting Emmaus and had been touched up by “someone who had made a hash of it”, setting the bar quite high for GoodGymmers!

We were given creative responsibility for choosing (or mixing!) from the paints available and didn’t expect the biggest challenge to be getting the lids off - Dave committed a good 30 minutes to his favourite tin and was rewarded with a fabulous matt dark blue for the big wall whilst Nadia found a lovely lively green for her first ever decorating.

Three hours in, we had a good first coat (and rollers that worked plus paint brushes that almost did) and a lot of chat completed 😀

An amber weather warning put paid to outside activities so instead, GoodGym Bristol ran and walked to Sparks including our newest member Sean, to help Lucy remove decorations from 3 different floors of the cavernous, maze-like building, formerly Marks and Spencer in Broadmead.

We were to shift a pile of wood and paint a wall. Sadly there was not enough paint to do the job, but that was only discovered by me covering my hand in the stuff! (they will have more paint next week?)

After we all speedily shifted the wood, it was time to say goodbye to Christmas (with the exception of 1 decoration that Frances DEMANDED, be left up (Lucy quickly agreed as she saw how Frances drove the bus!) Richard and Sean were the 'tall ones' so the climbed the ladders and folding table, before Vaguely Northern Darren was allowed to pose looking like a cute little fairy on top of the Christmas-tree-removing steps!

Richard and Chloe were excellent stepladder positioners and stability enforcers (that's a thing isn't it?) while Jason kept us amused with his never before heard Christmas cracker jokes!

We left after an hour of cancelling Christmas at Sparks and while the walkers went their seperate ways, the runners ran to Workout... and the bar was shut! So we tried The Old Duke and were rewarded with drinks and live music (it was an open mic night...luckily we left before the pianist started)!

A great way to kick of the New Year by helping Sparks to get ready to open again after the Christmas break.

Sparks is a department store with a difference, piloting new ways to better serve our community and address the climate, ecological and cost of living crisis.

Sparks is a vibrant, positive venue where visitors can explore what a greener, fairer and more creative future looks like. Sparks brings organisations and individuals from across the city together to pilot new ways to better serve our community and address the climate, ecological and cost of living crisis.

They needed some help moving items around the the store, including removing all the cardboard amassed through Christmas deliveries, rolling out a big refrigeration unit ready to be collected, moving some big wooden panels and holding these up against the wall whilst they were screwed into place, relocating a large plug table type thing, but the main big task was to move a giant toaster which acts as a recycling storage facility for unwanted electrical items.

This was no mean feat as the toaster was very heavy, yet seemed determined to fall apart with every twist and turn. We managed to initially lift it into onto a couple of small trucks for part of the journey, but these became unworkable when the wheels were pointing in the wrong direction, so we then managed to transfer the structure onto what looked like giant loo roll inners, made of cardboard but very strong, and with a couple of us lifting and pushing from inside the toaster and everyone else cajoling, guiding and heaving from outside, and everyone trying to hold the structure together, we succeeded in transporting the toaster across the store to it's new resting place! Yay!

There was even time for a welcome brew and an explore to find some dressing up items in true GoodGym fashion.

Well done to Bryony and Charlotte who really got stuck into their first ever GoodGym task and it was also great to see some new and familiar faces again. Happy New Year and see you all again soon!