Oh, we do love a collection task at GoodGym Portsmouth! Raiding our homes for things that someone else can re-purpose.

In this case, it was:

47 loo roll & kitchen roll tubes; 7 cereal boxes; 19 egg boxes; 14 shoe boxes; 22 plastic tubs; and 45 other boxes of all shapes and sizes (I think!)

The Final Straw Youth Eco-Conference will use these somehow - maybe an experimental biomass project, or a huge sculptural representation of waste, or a working replica of a wind farm. Who knows? But I bet they'll learn lots and have fun doing it.

First of all, thank you to Dr Jo for providing delicious treats that also gave us a title for the Run Report!

We teamed up with some of the staff from Trafalgar Medical Group as well as some local counsellors for this Heavy Duty GoodGym Task. Tony and Dave got to work with a heavy duty hammer and crowbar to lever up the paving slabs at the front of the Health Centre, whilst the rest of us tested our biceps to the limits carrying the slabs round to the back garden.

Maura and Judy worked hard tidying the borders and outside of the Health Centre, removing plenty of litter and lots of twigs and leaves. The rest of the team spent their time shovelling stones in to a central pile, which we will transport round to the front during our follow up task on Saturday - sign up here if you'd like to help out!

The team from Trafalgar Medical Group were incredibly grateful for our help. Dr Jack has sent over the following message of thanks for us all. Well done everyone!

Thanks for all the help today, you were all brilliant. Got some good news. The workmen on the road outside have agreed to turn over the earth at the front and drop a load of top soil down for us tomorrow. Please feedback to your fellow GoodGymers - it's all coming together!

Lovely start to a bright Sunday by helping out with the junior park run in bransbury park! With the task of handing out the finish tokens, we cheered on 44 enthusiastic kids coming through that finish line!

First up, was the greatly anticipated Golden Trainer....

1km, definitely no watches, predict your time, run or walk (or both), closest to their predicted time wins.

Here are the results from this year:

1. John 1 second faster than predicted
2. Jo 6 seconds faster
3. India 10 seconds slower

India and Sasha were the only two who went slower than their predictions.... everyone else underestimated their ability or (more likely) the effect of a bit of "friendly" competition and a stopwatch on their speed!

The full set of results can be seen as an image in the photos.

Part 2 - litter picking

The good deed part of the evening involved a litter pick around Kingston Rec, always a rich hunting ground for discarded items. Rachel was keen to find the usual items to really know that she was back in Pompey - there was definitely plenty of cigarette butts and a few full poo bags but did we find any clothing?

Other gems included a "diamond" (useful for proposing to a dog apparently), a broken brollie, a moped in a bush, half an avatar figure and a plastic crocodile. Find of the night was a Barbie who had a lot more street cred than any Barbie I owned when I was a kid, she matched Jen's outfit pretty well but had 1 more shoe than normally seen on Jen!

Many bags of litter and one bag of recycling were collected. Thanks to Vicki for taking the recycling back to her green bin.

We met up with Anna from Fratton Big Local and a couple of the friends of Kingston Rec who'd been doing a great job picking up litter in the park area. Anna brought snacks so once the golden trainer winner had been announced, easy peelers and biscuits were passed round and shared.

Great job by everyone. And lots of good pics tonight too (apologies that I didn't get everyone in action, I thought you'd probably be more interested in me pressing the stopwatch at the correct point!!).

We made it in time (!) and got through to the back garden where we were faced with lots of huge dandelions, weeds covering the path and a willow that had gone beyond weeping and was starting to veer into triffid territory!

We were very pleased to see that Jen's work on the buddleia a few years ago was work done well and there were no signs of it returning!

Katie London did some excellent (and maybe health & safety breaking) compacting of the branches in the brown bin.

Angela made good use of Jo's folding branch saw and took down lots of the willow branches.

Rosie identified the plants vs weeds and Wilson worked so hard that she wore a hole in her glove.

An hour's work and we'd made a huge difference to the garden, it looks much more inviting and hopefully it'll be well used by the clients of PARCS.

Milestones: Tonight was Tony's 200th good deed and we also got to see Dave's new black t-shirt celebrating his 50th good deed last week. Tony's 200th t-shirt will be on display soon...