On a chilly Wednesday evening we caught up about our weekend's activities of Santa Fun Run Volunteering, breakfast out, and our surprise 3rd place at the quiz on Sunday. Jess asked Rich how the Santa Fun Run was, and it became clear that she had confused Andy in a white polyester beard for Rich, much to both Andy's and Rich's delight. We also heard how Andy made his way through two pairs of felt Santa trousers before/during the run, no surprise. We completed our warm up, with more complaints than last week, and Joel sped off towards the task.

As tonight was Joe's last GoodGym of 2023, he turned up appropriately dressed in his special jacket, christmas lights, and festive pyjama bottoms. This also puts him in with an excellent chance of winning the best outfit prize in the return of the GoodGym awards this year.

We had the usual high levels of socialising, so much that we had to keep reminding Rich to use his rake rather than use it to prop himself up. Other than that, lots of leaves were cleared and bins filled at St John's Church Hall!

Great work everyone, we'll be back in January for more leaf clearing.

Laurie

Six GoodGymers got up at the crack of dawn to help set up the annual Farleigh Santa Fun Run. We met Selina who put us to work helping unload the van, before we set off round the course putting out flags and signage to make sure the Santas didn't get lost. By the time we got back to the event village there were Santas everywhere!

Rich left us to go back to his sick bed and Andy went off to transform into Saint Nick to take part in the race. The rest of us treated ourselves to breakfast as a reward for our hard work. We bumped into Joel and Abbi en route who joined us for something to eat. While we were there we did some research ready for the quiz this evening.

Our next group run will be another lot of leaf clearing at St John's Hall, hope to see you there.

12 GoodGymers and one little helper braved the cold for a volunteering session at Chelmsford Central parkrun.

We did marshalling, barcode scanning, and finish tokening.

Most of us struggled to resist the Mr Kiplings pies afterwards, followed by hot drink queues, large breakfasts and pancakes at our old faithful Wetherspoons.

Well done all, and we'll be repeating this in January!

Laurie