Before the GoodGym Christmas social, 5 eager GGers headed to the Good Intent to pick up litter pickers and complete a 20 minute litter pick in the city centre. 2 bags full was good work and a well deserved social afterwards.

On a bitterly cold night in Stirchley, we split into teams and set off to deliver 400 leaflets, and despite the freezing fingers, spirits stayed high as we covered street after street.

Once every leaflet had found its letterbox, we regrouped for a 4k run to warm up again (or at least try to!).

Huge praise to Sophie, who hadn’t run in ages but absolutely smashed a hilly route. Big thanks to Amy for bringing the leaflets and keeping everything brilliantly organised.

A chilly night, a lot of leaflets, a solid run, and an excellent team effort all round.

Tonight we attempted some spooky "stravart" - I had mapped out a run inspired by the Stirchley Skull but as it fell a bit short I drew out a ghosty instead! However as you can see from the expectations vs reality photo we did miss an eye out. Still a lovely run and it was fun to run round in a big circle!

It was a fantastic evening at St. Martin’s Church, with lots of painting to be done down an office corridor, leading into the outdoor area of a previous gardening task!

The shade was ‘Egyptian Cotton’ - hence ‘greige’… it’s a lovely fresh shade mixing beige and grey. So, before long our rollers were rolling and our paintbrushes were brushing!

Lots of tidy, intricate work around light switches, bannisters and along the masking tape borders. Plus some good coats on the main walls. We had a brilliant team and enjoyed welcoming Sophie to her first task.

Rich from the church helped us along with our painting and gave us a lovely little tour of other areas needing a fresh lick of paint. A few of us then headed into the city centre for a social and got a taste of Birmingham Cocktail Weekend’s vibes!

Stay tuned for the next task and our Christmas social going in the diary. Thank you again to everyone for helping out, it was wonderful teamwork!

Tonight was the first GoodGym Run club session. This will be a monthly session involving a structured running session generally involving some form of interval training followed by a litter pick.

Eve and Morwenna did the running session, led by Jonny who was on his bike.

Eve and Morwenna ran down to Millenium Point as a warm up and then it was straight into a fartlek session. This is a swedish term meaning 'to play with speed'. This basically means it's unstructured interval training. The session was 2 x 8 minute fartlek blocks with a 2 minute rest between sets. The efforts ranged from fast 20 second sprints, up to a more sustained 1 minute effort. The efforts were interspersed with 'easy running' recoveries. Both Morwenna and Eve pushed hard and were especially nippy on the 20 second efforts, catching Jonny by surprise at one point as he led the way on his bike.

Once done the 'warm down' was an uphill slog back to 1000 Trades.

Back at base we met Miriam who'd come for the litter pick. We collected our equipment and off we went to do our 'do good' bit. We found a pineapple skin, hence the pun I couldn't think of!

Once done we had a picture before heading back to 1000 Trades, were Morwenna, Eve and Miriam stopped for a drink and Jonny used the last of the light to bike home.