Looking for details about St Helena's Pier to Pier walks this weekend? We're all out of leaflets.

On this pleasant warm evening our diminished but enthusiastic team met at St Helena hospice to spread the word about the upcoming event with a last minute leaflet drop. We did better than initially anticipated, clearing a sizeable pile of flyers in the highwoods area, avoiding any dogs snapping our fingertips (although Tiffany did briefly confuse us with some cat noises), and heading home before the sun set. Hope some late signups can attend on Sunday, with plenty of local events in the coming months too.

Credit Louise for the photos (and the title 😉)

Whilst it has been some time since we helped St Helena Hospice it was great to do our bit with a last push for their Pier to Pier fund-raising walk. If you are interested it is on 8th May from Walton or Clacton Pier: sign up here

We met Jo, chatted about weekend running, St Helena's good work and the London Marathon. A close friend of mine is running in aid of St Helena and his fundraiser is here .

So from Leisure World we set about our delivery in Riverside Estate and will take the remainder to work places. Spirits were high after last weeks soaking and the interval sprints were met enthusiastically!

Well done on our first Tuesday task and we hope the new routine will catch on.

*Fifteen beautiful people spread a little love and leaflets in the Dutch Quarter and St Mary's Field area. *

We began our group run with some amazing news of local and national Goodgym events and community missions as well as the Goodgym Games in Oxford!

Vanessa is our shining star with her epic PB as she approaches 100 good deeds!!

We warmed up in the windless but cold night and leafleted like a storm. (Storm Goodgym??)

Once complete it was time for a race and we relayed up and down Balkerne Hill with the winners being rewarded with squats! We kept moving with Wagamama on our minds and a solid stretching and strength session before making our way for a well deserved meal.

Epic as usual. Nom nom.

If you are reading this and wondering about the title...well we found a Mr Bump cup abandoned in the road and adopted it. Cute.

It was an early start for our Goodgymers this morning who arrived at the Colchester Recycling Centre ready to lend a helping hand at the 6th year of the annual Christmas Tree Treecycle for St Helena's Hospice.

On arrival we heard that this year's collection would be bigger than ever, with 2400+ trees booked for collection from across Colchester and the surrounding areas. This meant £23645 had been donated to St Helena Hospice - an amazing figure that will go towards helping to families and their sick loved ones accessing the hospice and support services.

The other amazing thing about the Treecycle is that it saved 2400 trees from going into landfill waste! Instead they will be broken down and turned into mulch, so that it can help other plants to grow.

Our Goodgymers Alex, Chrissie and Ian split into two teams, joined by Chloe and a couple more volunteers from Blowers and Mowers (who generously let us use their vehicles for the tree collection) and raced to see who would be first to complete their route! Whilst Ian's team completed their route first, we believe Alex and Chrissie team collected more trees and covered a greater distance!! Everyone is a winner in our eyes! And most importantly everybody's arms got a workout today.

Between them nearly 200 trees were collected from Blackheath, Layer, Lexden, Birch and central areas of Colchester. Catherine ran to join them at Colchester Recycling Centre to help unload the trees from the vans.

An treemendous effort from everyone - well done!

It is not every week that Goodgym Colchester gets an award but last week we did and not just any award, an award that is as unique as Goodgym itself. The Athletic Gardening Award trophy and Rosette gave us the chance to bathe in our own glory, quietly, modestly and humbly satisfied with our reward. As well as the glitz and glamour of a Town Hall award ceremony, Goodgymers were in Tiptree (how jammy) for 10 miles and at the Royal Parks half marathon. Stories of Goodgym's legendary sportspersonship (Susie) fell on proud ears. It was great to see Louise who played an important role in the award with her commitment to Goodgym too.

But never resting on our laurels the task awaited. Lisa, from St Helena events team, had met me before heading off to a spin class and gave me leaflets for a fundraising event in February...a 5k run at the University of Essex. Sign me up! We headed across the river and did thirty-five minutes of leafleting with Marcela, our newest recruit (All the way from Chile), leading the way! Muy Bien.

Our training session involved two timed shuttle run sprints. Using the lampposts as markers the runners sprinted to the first and back, second and back and third and back getting a high heart rate and showing real determination. The caveat was that on the second run each person had to try and beat their previous time. With ample rest (!) the sprint was repeated and everyone beat their time. WOW!

At the weekend we will welcome Andy S back from Kenya so obviously Parkrun and Pub quiz is the only option. Next week is social week. Can not wait.

13 GoodGymers in Colchester delivered leaflets on behalf of St Helena hospice this evening. You may think 13 is an unlucky number but we were in high spirits and as Alex noted this may be due to the disappearance of the 'bad moon'. Tav handed out some goodies from The Great Get Together including wrist bands and stickers.

We were met at Leisure World by Jo who thanked us on behalf of St Helena for the task at hand - to deliver leaflets advertising their Walk of Memories event being held on Sunday 7th July. We set out in the slightly damp and drizzly weather and after warming up under cover outside Leisure World we ran in shuttle run efforts back and forth from our walk leader Ian, making our way to some nearby housing estates. We tackled the houses in pairs. Luckily there were no scary encounters with dogs and only some friendly neighbourhood cats, including one with no ears (?!) and one with three legs. Vanessa also found a rather curious Lionshell snail, who seemed to want to claim the mail as its own 🐌. We now know the meaning of the expression 'snail mail...'.

Our fitness session consisted of some group shuttle runs on the edge of Highwoods country park - this tested both our ability to not slip over on the wet ground and our counting skills as we were instructed to sprint for 30 seconds and jog back for a recovery.

We made our way back to Leisure World in a similar shuttle run style and ended up at the skate park to do some abs work on the abandoned ramps. We did 8 different exercises tabata-style, 20 second efforts and 10 second recoveries.

Have a lovely week everyone, whether that's resting and recovering, racing or raving. Remember we have more in common.