Today saw a great turnout for our first non headtorch run of the year!

Today was international Victoria day but rather than base our welcome on that we shared what we would do with our bank holiday weekend.

It should really have been Leanne day as she wasn't just crowned goodgymer of the month, but also got to wear the good deed cape for doing an incredible 1300 good deeds!

We also welcomed Ellie and congratulated Nick snd Babs for being married for 35 years!

We then set off to two tasks-

At Rowntree Park we were greeted by Stu who split us into 3 teams. The first team got to grips with a load of soil that we had previously shifted from from the gardens to the back of the lodge. This time we moved it to its final location into the raised beds.

The second group tackled a load of green waste and moved it from across the park over to the table tennis area. With Max particularly enjoying taking a ride in the giant wheelbarrow

Team 3 were instructed to remove the sedge from the garden, and after a quick Google to find out what sedge is, felt competent enough to know what they were doing. However the sedge in Rowntree park was about 50 times bigger than the ones in the photos on Google! Eventually the sedges, Sedgeric and Right Sedge Fred, were moved to their new homes closer to the lake.

All 3 teams finished their jobs with enough time spare to fill a couple of barrows worth of wood chip from the wildlife area and move it to the gardens. We were briefly joined by Jackie who earned her place in the team photo by grabbing a couple of handfuls of wood chip!

The second team stopped off at Southlands church to clear a bed of everything except the Magnolia tree! We pretty much completed the task just in time for team Rowntree to collect us and head to the park for some fun fitness.

Tonight we played heads, shoulders, knees and coins and the team with the most won a creme egg. After much tackling and slightly too much violence for goodgym, it all came down to a deciding game of rock paper scissors.

We then headed back to base and a decent crew stayed on for a drink, possibly to get one of Babs brownies!

Good Gym York kicked of the York Great British Spring Clean in style - nearly! The litter picking fairies had been out in Holgate recently so the haul of litter was a little lighter than expected but still we managed to get a good bag full each. Treasures included a tyre, hanging baskets, wheel hub.... Thanks to Paul & his magical wizardry for the pun which he manifested in the Fox post task.

Tonight was a perfect GG York task with absolutely zero skill required, just hard graft and the ability to break stuff! But before we got stuck in to the session we celebrated the previous week's happenings with J, PK and Leanne having completed a via ferrarta course and a couple of p.1's at parkrun for Matt and Ed (not that it's a race, of course!)

So off to the task, with Vicky and Babs being our biker gang, Laura leading a steady group and Ed leading the main group with Amy backmarking.

A very enthusiastic welcome greeted us at Glen Allotments and some excellent instructions which basically boiled down to "move stuff from here and chuck it in the skip. Oh, and here's a hammer if you want to bash it up a bit"! There was also the promise of some baked goods at the end, (but only if they'd earned it - Ed)

We soon got into the swing of things with a one group staying in the allotment and handing stuff to our runners and then brining it over to Mitch and Michael who were on skip organising and smashing duties. There were all sorts of methods for breaking the items down including chucking it on the floor, kicking it, bashing it with other stuff and eventually making use of the aforementioned hammer 🔨

Before long the skip was full and the allotment plot was looking a whole lot clearer, even if there was still a bit left over that we couldn't fit into the skip. Still definitely worthy of some cake, but only after fitness....

This week, the group were organised into 4 teams with members of each team coming up to collect a card from Ed which corresponded to a particular exercise. The team that completed the most exercises and therefore had collected the most cards would be first in line for cake. This clearly spurred on Max's team who completed a whopping 15 exercises and had first pick of the rather excellent flapjacks and rock cake 🎂