Tonight was our final evening task before the clocks change and the headtorches reverse-hibernate in Leah's car boot. As you can see from the pics, it was actually still light when we started!

The same team as last week were at it again, swapping litter pickers for letterboxes to spread the word about Base51 – a local charity that supports young people aged 11-24 by offering counselling, youth club sessions, LGBTQIA support and more.

We made short work of our 250 leaflets, and as far as I heard no-one met any snakes this time. I don't think we even saw many (if any) cats!

A crew of five GoodGymers turned up for what might be one of our last dark tasks of the winter!

Hi-vis and headtorches donned, we headed out onto Racecourse Road to give it a spruce up.

There was certainly plenty of rubbish, so much in fact that we had to leave one section to the council for safety reasons. We even found a Sainsbury's bag with two unopened bottles of Stella that had been there so long that weeds had grown right through the handle!

All in all a productive hour of picking, ending with a fond farewell to Emily from the council who has been our contact there for the past couple of years (that long already??) and is now moving onwards and upwards.

Three GoodGymers were up bright and early to make sure the runners at the Nottingham 10k got round safely.

We got to our designated meeting place near Forest Rec around 7:30 😴 where we were briefed and given our marshalling points - at three side roads off the main route around the 2km mark.

As always, some of the drivers were less than pleased with us for shutting the roads, but once they were gone we were able to soak up the excitement and cheer and clap as the runners came past us near the top of one of the many hills. Including our very own GoodGymers Rachel and Jules! Great job, both of you! It looked like a tough course!

In the second part of our double-header to welcome in the new year, we headed back to the Meadows Food Bank.

Six of us had a run (or a run/walk) down to the river and back, headtorches on and looking out for ice – it was -1°C after all! Thankfully we all stayed upright and arrived back with enough time for a quick stretch before heading in to get stuck into Mark's latest jobs for us.

The Food Bank often has to buy large quantities of stock at once, so it's difficult to keep an eye on the dates on things and make sure the products with the shortest shelf lives get given out first, avoiding unnecessary wastage. Our task was therefore to sift through the various stock categories and arrange things in date order so the regular volunteers don't have to spend time looking at all the packages when they come up to grab stock.

Rachel and Leah started with cereal before heading over to help Nigel (celebrating his 25th task, amazing job!) find any tins with a date in the next three months and bring them down. The three then had a few minutes left to split up several four-packs of tuna (a surprisingly tricky task) and date them all before putting them out on the racks.

Meanwhile, Tom, Matthew. Bozena and our brand-new GoodGymers Lindsey and Maisie carried on sorting out the stock upstairs, with Tom apparently having to buy us all a drink at the next social after losing a bet about whether there'd be any pasta packets with a different date to the rest in the pile.

All in all, a fantastic start to the year! Go GoodGym Nottingham!