It's been an arduous six weeks, filled with blood, sweat and tears (mainly from Sallyann!) Fay used all of her credit with the GoodGym crew to cajole, I mean motivate, everyone to take part. Some people embraced the challenge, others were lacklustre at best, and some were worryingly addicted! It all paid off in the end though as we reigned supreme on average points and after a last minute fight to the death with those 'Continuous Dance' rascals we came second on total points too. We showed our class by having some fizz in a Lidl car park to celebrate!

Obviously special mention goes to Sallyann for her unfaltering commitment to beating the streets. Russell would get an accolade but he decided to go on holiday and lost his way at the last knockings, ending up in fourth place. Andy used song lyrics to keep him going on his strava beatbox missions, coming in third. The dark horse of the competition was Martin though, who started late but couldn't resist the siren song of those beautiful boxes. He romped into second place, after giving Sallyann some sleepless nights as he came perilously close to taking pole position. He knew better than to mess with Ayrton Senna though, overtaking would have meant sleeping with one eye open for the forseeable.

It was the competition we loved to hate. We're proud of our achievements but we're glad it's over! Would we do it again next year? Ask us later!

Great work team.

12 GoodGymers and one little helper braved the cold for a volunteering session at Chelmsford Central parkrun.

We did marshalling, barcode scanning, and finish tokening.

Most of us struggled to resist the Mr Kiplings pies afterwards, followed by hot drink queues, large breakfasts and pancakes at our old faithful Wetherspoons.

Well done all, and we'll be repeating this in January!

Laurie

11 GoodGymers were up bright and early to volunteer at Chelmsford Parkrun this morning. It was a very special occasion, (some would say even bigger than Rich's wedding), as there were lots of milestones to celebrate today. Rich was celebrating his 250th run (walk) and 50th volunteer for Parkrun. Wanting to keep it low key he came with just the two yellow balloons in order not to draw attention to himself. David was also celebrating his 200th good deed for GoodGym. Everyone else was celebrating the fact they were doing good and had breakfast to look forward to!

Fay, Joe and Paul headed off to their marshal positions. Richard and Martin were entrusted with the bikes. Rich and Sallyann followed up the rear as the tailwalkers. David and Cherry were barcode scanning and Laurie and Rachel were token sorting. Despite an early shower, the morning was mainly dry, if not particularly sunny. 673 parkrunners made it round the course and once we had returned our lanyards and high-viz we made our way over to Bill's for breakfast, having said goodbye to David and Sallyann en route. Andy was obviously missing us while on holiday as he joined us in spirit from Bill's in Lanzarote!

After some discussion it was decided we should get a team together for the Ale House pub quiz tomorrow night, so we have an impromptu social coming up. You can sign up here

Next week, for our group run, we are at Broomfield allotments for a spot of gardening, you can sign up here

Special thanks to the parkrun photographers who contributed to our photo gallery today