Six years of GoodGym Newcastle!

In some ways this birthday milestone feels like it should be much higher, I don’t know about you but I struggle to remember a time before GoodGym was in my life. In other ways six years has gone by in the blink of an eye. Prior to tonight’s group session we had done 5092 good deeds, which given the monumental pause we had in the middle of this is pretty remarkable. Pats on all of the backs for this - 397 backs to be precise, as that’s how many people have done a good deed with us now. No wonder I struggle to remember names at times!

It was fitting that we were back to base for the session tonight for the first time in a few months to help our friends and hooved heroes at Stepney Bank Stables. It may have been the promise of drinks at The Ship Inn afterwards, but we also had a great attendance tonight when we were joined by nine people including one for the first time. We did a quick catch up on the weekend’s session that was a very last minute mulch request from our friends at EarthWatch, and brought Tom back from honeymoon with a bang! We loved welcoming Rob to his first ever session with us tonight and while it wasn’t a standard group run we hope it was a suitable initiation to the group.

Stepney Bank stables is a charity and community out project that works with young people to improve wellbeing through working with horses, and we are really proud to be able to help them regularly including for tonight’s session. A banquet of jobs is always on order and tonight was no different as we were sweeping and clearing in the arena, vacuuming the entrance, sweeping the outdoor ramp, chopping back nettles and collecting sticky weeds as a special foodie treat for the horses- this one came complete with feeding! To finish off, Rob got the best ever job for a GoodGym debutant - riding the quad to sweep the arena floor! Lucky or what?!

It was a shorter task this evening as we were eager to head over to The Ship Inn for celebratory birthday drinks and a superb homemade cake from Anna. Big thanks also to GoodGym HQ for sending us a crate of Athletic Brewing Company beers for the session- Tom had cracked his open before we’d even left the stables! It was so great to see Tanya and Debbie at the pub too who had come across in time after work.

Pints were drank, cake was slapped into open palms (no, really), a great end to a good start to the week.

As yet we don’t have a task for next Monday (sob!) so please send one my way if you know of a charity that could use our help. To ensure a GoodGym fix, there is a junior parkrun opportunity at Mowbray Juniors this Sunday so do help out if you can.

Thanks once again to everyone who’s been part of GoodGym Newcastle especially those run leaders and task force who help me to keep the cogs turning. You’re all brilliant.

Due to the Easter holidays our sessions have been a bit all over the place for a few weeks so it didn’t feel too weird doing a Tuesday session to help our friends at Ouseburn Trust. This fab charity maintains loads of green spaces around our Stepney Bank Stables space and it’s always a great workout. We’ve done so many sessions with these guys and they are always varied, everything from path clearing to litter picking and tree planting. It was lovely to join them for an evening task in daylight, and an added bonus of missing the rain by minutes!

This session had been billed as a Beginners session but alas no beginners were anywhere to be found. Instead, three regulars rocked up for this one, Damu starting early ahead of the pack to allow him to leave early without feeling guilty. What a superstar.

Tonight we were path edging on the steps to the Cumberland Arms, a popular thoroughfare through the network of paths connecting Ouseburn and the wider city. Path edging makes paths safer, clearer and has the added bonus of needing a lot of physical action to make a difference. We also learned the difference between Dutch hoes and British ones (one has a curved edge and one is flat) tonight which might come in handy one day. We unearthed and rendered temporarily homeless a number of worms tonight, but I’m sure the later rain helped them to find somewhere new pretty quickly! Hopefully you can see the difference we made in the before and after pictures.

We received an urgent referral today for some help at the Tiny Forest site in Bensham that needs some muscle and a few pairs of hands on it. Keep an eye out for that, it will be listed tomorrow for this weekend.

It was one of those deceptively sunny days where as soon as you step out of the sun you step into a fridge for our visit to help at North Marine Junior parkrun in South Shields.

Let's get a huge round of applause for Aimee who completed her 50th parkrun volunteer today and earned herself the red V50 tshirt. The bulk of Aimee's volunteer points are at junior events so it was fitting that she earned this today.

We covered three roles at North Marine Juniors today: Paul and I timekeeping and Aimee marshalling. 52 brilliant kids ran, walked, skipped and hopped to the finish today and the finish line was the happiest place to be as always. A lovely blue sky start to Sunday all round.

It may be my age but it doesn’t feel like five months since we last did a donation drive for our friends at East End Women at Building Futures East. Time flies I suppose! We met tonight at the Cycle Hub at the Quayside for a social walk combined with a donation collection for the foodbank. As we aren’t back at our Stepney Bank Stables base until next week it felt like great timing.

We have been helping the Foodbank for over four years now, with early tasks being during Covid, sessions which ran through all of the lockdowns and provided structure for us and support for the project. In fact, for some of us during that time it was the only place we ever went and had any human contact outside of our homes. We’ve also helped to pack Christmas food parcels, deliver leaflets, paint their project spaces and even helped to decorate a bus.

There was no such hands-on-ness for us tonight as instead we just met for a social walk and catch up. There had originally been four signed up for the session but it ended up being just me and Anna with some Mondayish circumstances getting in the way! We had a lovely walk up to the swing bridge, under the Tyne bridge and back over the millennium bridge (thats a lot of bridges) and chatted about all things work, marriage and life related- it sounds heavy when it’s written like that but it wasn’t! We made it back to the hub just in time for the rain to start again.

Post-Easter can be a challenging time for families and donations can be lower so I’ll keep the donation bag in my car for the next week or so, so you can bring donations along to the next few sessions and I’ll take them along when we have a few more.

There are three chances to do good stuff with us this weekend, including this big Urban Green Community mission on Saturday which looks like it’s going to be massive. Our Monday session moves to Tuesday next week as we join forces with the brilliant Ouseburn Trust. We’d love to see you at that as we take advantage of the light spring nights.

Have a great week!

What a fab GoodGym morning at Sandown Allotments today!

Four out of five of us had started the day with a parkrun, while Rae had run 5k to the task which definitely counts! Anna did a combo of both- running Jesmond Dene parkrun before running to the task. Kudos!

This cute community allotment first asked for our help a few months back with soil clearing as they work towards creating some planters for local people to look after and support their mental health. This was a perfect example of a super GoodGym task as we got stuck into a proper physical workout alongside a group of the allotments' regular volunteers. Forks and spades aplenty, countless wheelbarrow trips and a huge amount of satisfaction went into really giving this task some welly. Anna got so into this one that she managed to land bottom-first into some nettles- that girl doesn't know her own strength! With no dock leaves nearby she danced her way through the session like a trooper and handed us this perfect pun on a platter (Paul's work, not mine!).

Ninety minutes of digging were rewarded by the amazing task owners with a selection of homemade cakes, bakes, biscuits and hot drinks. Truly a morning well spent and one we would love to revisit again and again.

It was our last “normal” Monday session for a couple of weeks due to the Easter holidays bringing a bit of disruption and yet this wasn’t exactly a normal one in the truest sense. First of all it was a short one- partly due to only having 50 leaflets left to deliver and partly due to utterly awful weather conditions. (Come on, Spring, hurry along now, there’s a good season!). It rained relentlessly and was freezing tonight leading to my Heaton/temperature related pun.

In the absence of a run leader we gathered for a walking session tonight and caught up on the weekend’s community missions. I was dying to know whether Lucy’s Mum was available to commission birthday cakes for the upcoming GG Newcastle sixth birthday next month as her cake creations at yesterday’s big Urban Green Century celebration looked divine! The answer was, thankfully, yes. Woop.

Thankfully the first part of this route is all up hill which helped to get the blood pumping and keep us warm as we headed into Heaton for the final part of the leaflet drive we’ve done for our friends at East End Women.

I’m not joking when I say this was one of the quickest tasks ever with leaflets completed in about 4 minutes, leaving us plenty of time to have a proper life catch up and forget about the rain, a great start to the week.

If leaflets are your thing, or if dogs are your thing, or if combining both is your thing, then get involved with another flyer session this Thursday where so far only Louise is spreading the word for Guide Dogs in Benton. Please help if you can!

Keep an eye on session listings over the next few weeks and read them carefully, there’s lots going on but sometimes with unusual days and meeting points! Hope to see you soon.