Goodgym Southampton is one year old today!! 🎉🎂

To celebrate we went to city farm with an army of goodgymers ready and eager to help with whatever task Tom may have had in mind for us. We were pretty sure it was going to be more goat mountain shenanigans but were shocked when farm volunteer Danni mentioned that this evening we would be helping put all the animals to bed and meeting them all by means of celebration and thankyou.

We were thoroughly spoilt - getting to feed the sheep and goats, getting walked by the new pygmy boys, putting the chickens and ducks to bed and meeting all the reptiles from the blue tongued skink to the gecko and giant african land snail.

After our tour of the farm we were kindly given use of the community room to celebrate our birthday with cake and drinks kindly supplied by Energise Me and Ellie.

We were also delighted to see Paul and Simon back with us after last weeks litter pick and to welcome Aimee for her first goodgym task.

Its been an incredible year with 157 tasks(!!!). Heres to seeing what year two brings!

Before birthday celebrations could commence at the farm this evening we were back to work delivering the 10,000 leaflets alloted to us to deliver.

We had 8 super helpers this evening and it really did prove that 8 and not 3 is the magic leafleting number! We even held a guard of welcome honour for Leszek who found us.

we very quickly got through 200 leaflets with some time for frolics thrown in before heading back to the farm. Great job team!

Wow what an evening!

We had a gap in the diary this evening with no community organisation based tasks so decided to do our first litter pick.

Living directly behind an alley which is regularly frequented with litter that solo attempts make little difference to i was keen to get it sorted for a task.

We were joined this evening by two lovely newbies Simon and Paul who forgo both climbing and the pub to join us!

Its fair to say we were kept busy for the full hour. We had separate bags for recycling cans (which ellie is going to take to the air ambulance collection) general waste and glass.

We filled several very big bags and had a great time chatting along the way. A real noticeable difference has been made to the local community, well done team!

We returned for our second visit to George Williams YMCA this evening. After successfully ensuring we could enter the garden at last weeks visit we decided to start tackling different sections of the garden this evening.

It was lovely to be joined by Lucy and Duncan this evening who had travelled from Portsmouth to brave the hideous rain and lend a hand! Thankyou both.

Duncan and Hannah split into a team litter picking the vast amount of litter in the garden. Top finds from them were a knife and fork!

Lucy, Helen and Grace decided to tackle the bramble bush of doom which was just inside the door. Grace earned top marks from Lucy for her bramble technique and the team soon uncovered a shopping trolley(which was repurposed into a rubbish holder) two washing up bowls and a whole other mountain of litter.

I decided to use one of the bowls to collect glass in, there was so much it seemed to never end! In the end i called defeat on squatting down for glass after yesterday's marathon squatting escapades and once litter mountain was uncovered started to make an attempt in disposing of that.

Overall it was a very wet but enjoyable evening. Much rubbish and brambles were cleared and we look forward to returning soon!

Bright and early on Sunday morning at 7am(!!!) four eager goodgymers set out to help the runners of the ABP marathon, half marathon, 5k and 10k look after their bags by helping run the baggage hall.

With 7000+ runners there were a lot of bags to safely distribute to their place within the guildhall and then redistribute back out again.

Luckily the abp team had a wonderful system in place making this quite an easy task. We had to take each runners bag to the corresponding area in the hall for their race number. We then had to sanity check in the downtime to ensure no errors were made and try make the space a bit more organised. We then had to find the bags again (and in some cases suitcases!!) and return them efficiently to their rightful owners. It was a very physical effort, Hannah clocked up over 20,000 steps and with lots of bending and lifting its fair to say we had a good goodgym workout and a good time keeping the runners happy.

We were kindly rewarded with cakes and sandwiches from the abp team which went down very nicely and hope to be back again next year!