It was great to have lots of new faces join us for the final Tuesday Group Run of January: welcome to Richard, Harriet, Isabelle, Pawel, Sara Sona! And welcome to Frankie joining us from GoodGym Hackney for the next few weeks!

We tested everyone's brain power with a game of Shona Says (back by popular demand). Everyone's brains were ticking pretty nicely and there was only a few forfeit sprints. We split the group into three to complete our tasks for the evening:

1. Donation sorting at the British Heart Foundation
2. Tree pulling for Up Our Street
3. Painting at Redcliffe Nursery

Skirting the issue

Richard led a team of 10 to British Heart Foundation to help with donation sorting. Divided between sorting donations, tagging them and getting a new found love of steaming, the group got through loads of donations and found some hot new outfit items for their wardrobes (see photo evidence).

No beating about the bush

Meanwhile, Gary led a group to The Dings to help Up Our Street in their garden beds their. The team were surprised at the task of all of them removing a bush in the middle of the bed. Surely it wouldn't take them all to do that? But half an hour of them rotating and shovelling later and the group got the satisfaction of getting the whole thing out - well done gardening team!

Painting the town Redcliffe

The rest of us headed to Redcliffe Nursery with Mel leading a walking group there. Once we had all convened (with some detours), we got inside and split between painting the corridors and offices, moving all of the pebbles back into the pebble pit, sweeping and litter-picking the garden and doing the Squat & Lunge 200 Challenge. After half an hour of rotating around the different jobs, the nursery had a new feature wall in their office, a tidy playground and a coat of paint on the entrance to their hall and we had sore thighs and bums and surprisingly un-paint covered clothes. We will be back again soon to continue the job!

Once we were all back from our different corners of Bristol, we were able to celebrate the wonderful Alex hitting 200 (and 14) Good Deeds - she hit the big 2-0-0 a couple of weeks ago but this was her first Tuesday run to be presented with her t-shirt. In the meantime, she has managed to rack up 7% more deeds than what was being celebrated, wow.

Good-deeded and celebrated, that was it for another night of GoodGym Bristol and the last of the January challenge Group Runs!

Pun credit to Gazza

46 GoodGymers braved the cold and the first dark, dark night of the winter to come and get fit and do good. We got warmed up (revealing some shocking facts along the way, including who eats dinner before they come to GoodGym) and then split into our three groups for the night.

Alice led the first group to Fry Court to finish off a Community Mission from last month, Richard was leading a team of rubble movers to help Up Our Street and the rest of us headed to St Paul's Adventure Playground.

Frytonight

Alice's group were tasked with finishing weeding a raised bed at Fry Court sheltered housing and adding some fresh compost ready for the residents to plant. The gentleman who lived closest to the plot was absolutely delighted, and came to thank the team specially. Not satisfied with just one set of good in a night, the team then did some leafleting relays down Stackpool road to get seasonal with the Christmas Santa Dash happening in just 5 weeks' time!

GoodGym causing t'rubble

Richard's team were also set to work on the raised beds. They met Melissa from Up Our Streetwho showed them the area to clear, which was three beds with lots of rubble on top. The group got to work clearing this area and wheelbarrowing the debris away (with Gary and Darren fitting in some 90 metre sprints along the way) and made a massive dent in the work. A local resident even stopped to say thank you to the group :)

Insane in the membrane

Meanwhile the rest of the group was at St Paul's Adventure Playground where we had three tasks: to clear all of the leaves from the playground from the London Plane Tree, which become slippy and dangerous; to continue digging the trench we started last month for a tyre barrier next to the flying fox swing; and to help the team from Monkey Do who are building a brand new swing with digging a big hole for it. The leaves were soon cleared, the trench was well on it's way to housing the final two tyres and the giant hole was not quite a giant hole, but the team made a jolly good crack at it (intermingled with conducting their own archaeological dig to find a giant membrane from the ground which was not, as at first wondered, a long-lost fossil). With very muddy trainers, we headed back to Queen Square.

Centuri-darr-en

Once everyone had reconvened from their tasks, it was time to celebrate the amazing Darren achieving his 100th Good Deed tonight - massive well done Darren!! He donned the centurion outfit, did the Gallop of the 100s, and then treated us all to his incredible vegan carrot cake and millionaire's shortbread bakes. Who needs the Bake Off final?!

Tonight's pun kudos goes to Alice, Lexi and Richard

It was a very rainy Shrove Tuesday tonight. While the people of Bristol sat in traffic jams to get home to their cosy pancakes, we donned our waterproofs and got ready to run.

We were helping two tasks tonight: Group 1 set off to help Emmaus and Group 2 to help Up Our Street.

Emmaus had just got a big delivery of donations from another charity shop which was closing down. They therefore had a choc-a-block warehouse which needed sorting. Many bodies squeezed between each other and all of the donated goods to get as much sorting as possible to organise the warehouse going forward.

The second group (after having a long press-up, chair hold and squat stint on the way) were met by Khalil from Up Our Street who manages the Lawrence Hill area. He armed us with litter pickers, hi-viz and bags and the group split into teams of 4 to tackle each of the allocated streets in the 30 minute time frame. The group had soon cleared the streets and gathered over 8 bags of litter to be collected by Bristol Waste. Khalil was delighted with our efforts and has already asked for us to come back and help again.

The two groups ran back to base in the increasing rain and gathered for the second most important activity of the night (good deeds always come first, obviously): the Pancake Race 🥞. Each team was equipped with a frying pan and a pancake and instructed to sprint and flip until their whole team had successfully ran. Some questionable flips, some very muddy dropped pancakes and some downright mush later, I think we can truthfully say that we should probably stick to the running...

We rounded off the evening with an alternative circular, beige snack with our monthly GoodGym Eats to Franco Manca, where we warmed up stuffing ourselves with hot sourdough - delicious!

Q: Why couldn’t the runner get away from the zombie? A: He hit the wall

But there was no wall-hitting tonight, only a bunch of brave GoodGymers, risking missing the Bake Off Final merely by attending and risking losing all feeling in their fingers and toes by weeding on such a cold night, and a bunch of weeds and litter, soon to be no more.

Ghosts v Ghouls

While the Walking Group made a headstart, the night started with an incredible show: as a merely Trainer in a world of other beings, I watched as the Ghosts and Ghouls battled it out in a running-drill-Scare Off. Luckily, it wasn't quite scary enough to scare off Rodwel on his first GoodGym experience - phew and welcome!

Exorcise

On our way to the task, this foolish ghoulishness was continued with zombie walking lunges (special shout out to Clo and Alex who did this with impressive enthusiasm and sound effects) and we soon made it to Newtown to meet Saliha from Up Our Street.

Fangtastic good deeding

The group split into litter-pickers and weeders. With this divide and conquer tactic, we had soon got rid of a whole section of weeds from 30 metres of the roadside in question, while the litter pickers managed to fill several bags per pair with litter (with the top interesting finds going to Caroline and Richard's chair, Clo's glasses and Alex's car keys). Within 30 minutes, the group had created a pile of full bags of litter, garden waste and recycling to be collected by Bristol Waste tomorrow. During this time, Clo and Darren mastered the art of litter-picking swinging (see the photo for evidence) and other members of the group were spotted practicing their zombie moves for tomorrow... All in a hard night's work!

With the temperature dropping further, we started on a speedy keep-warm run home, stopping for a quick game of Halloween corners and covering Darren's favourite Wobbly Bridge Strava Segment along the way. Before long, we were back at base with another Good Deed under our belts and, although we tried, we had not managed to outrun the skele-pun.

You are all unboolievable, and I will leave you with a final, awful Halloween joke to send you on your scary ways...

What do you get when you drop a pumpkin? Squash.

The divisive Tuesday night question: England's match in the knock out stages of the World Cup, or bagging a Good Deed with GoodGym? While a few red tee's strayed to the bar (and kept us updated with regular commentary of the match, thanks Darren), the rest of us prepped our helpful legs of a night of dodging England fans while running to do good. It was great to meet Anna, Alexandra and Alice as they joined us for their first run with GoodGym - welcome!

After the group warmed up with a very simple (ahem) game of GoodGym's very own Ship Sea Shore (the catchy Park, Food Bank, School, of course...), we split into two groups.

Group 1: A sign of the times

Dave did a wonderful job as group leader and chief cameraman (and pun maker) of the GoodGymers who were going to help Up Our Street with a challenging task. They had a big chalkboard which was at the side of the Bristol-Bath cycle path, but they wanted to give it to another of our tasks, the Felix Road Playground. Little did we know when we arranged for the group to come and do this, that several weeks of hot, dry weather would make the task a whole lot harder as the ground was so solid. But the crew did not give up and they shovelled and shoogled until the sign was loose. The Pink Panther then acted as a great supervisor watching the group carefully get the sign to the right place. All in all, a job very well done!

Group 2: Lifting us up

Meanwhile, the rest of us went back to our favourite Bristol storage unit to help East Bristol Food Bank sort their food donations ready to be made into food parcels for local people in need. As our normal guide Andy was tied up being loyal to Engand, we met Sally from the Food Bank team who was showing us the way. All our practice has been paying off and we managed to get the crates sorted and back in storage in no time! We are yet to finalise whether our speed of sorting or the number of people we fit in the lift was record-breaking, but we believe they both were!

Mel did a much better job than me of leading her group home from the Food Bank while catching Gromits (getting ready for Sunday's Gromit Run) - even managing to sneak one in the Marriott!

All of this was topped off by our monthly GoodGym Eats, this month at Turtle Bay. Thanks to Liam for organising - we had a relaxing or nail-biting experience depending on whether you were tucking into the 2-4-1 cocktails or tuning into Darren's continued football commentary.

Two tasks complete, a lovely meal eaten and a night well-spent!