Our first festive task of this season brought a little bit of joy to plenty of GoodGymers this evening. We joined volunteers at Baffins Pond Association to put up the Christmas Decorations around the compound.

Everyone got in the spirit and there were plenty of super Christmas jumpers, hats and leggings on display.

Wilson's commitment to detail extended to all of the little statues in the compound who are now sporting very dapper Christmas bow-ties!

The compound looked absolutely fantastic by the time we were done - Christmas basically threw up over Baffins Pond this evening.

We had exceptional autumnal weather for the 10km race at The Ageas Bowl this morning.

We welcomed Richard to his first GG Race Event - great to have you along today!

Those of us that ran last year had forgotten the levels of undulations on the course, although Dave is very convinced he ran up a few mountains!

Thank you all for hanging out with me after our task today! I don't normally do anything to celebrate my birthday, but it was lovely to spend it with my GoodGym chums.

Special thanks to Katie CR for bringing donuts and to Ellie, Sinéad, Katie and Dave for being mad enough to to jump in the sea with me.

I hope you all enjoyed your Athletic Brewing Co. alcohol free beers this evening. If you would like to order some more, check out their website here - just remember there is a GoodGym discount code for 20% off!!

We were very lucky with the weather this evening as the sun decided to break through the clouds just in time for our session.

Team 1 enjoyed a pleasant and fairly scenic pre-task run around Old Portsmouth, whilst Team 2 couldn't wait to get stuck in to the litter pick!

We were pleased to see that the beach didn't need a lot of help from us as it was fairly clean on arrival. Of course, in true GoodGym fashion, we did still manage to find two socks!

We ended the litter pick with everyone waving in some arrivals from across The Channel on a Brittany Ferry. Turns out your never too old to get excited by people waving at you from a ferry!

Our Group Run took us to King's Church Food Bank today, and we had three separate groups travelling to the task today; runners, walkers and cyclists!

Leanne had plenty of tasks to keep us busy. the majority of the squad were in the church hall loading trolleys and crates ready for Food Bank Users to come and collect on Friday.

The second team were in the warehouse unpacking and stacking a massive delivery from Tesco. Although a regular at our St George's Food Bank tasks, Christine came along this evening for her first Group Run, so give her a cheer! I must apologise as Team Warehouse had a very high ratio of innuendos in our chat this evening 😳

We were kept well hydrated by Leanne and her family who were with us this evening, and Sinéad even provided watermelon! A very sophisticated evening.

After a rather sweaty run up from the Lido, we were greeted by Val and Louis with some refreshing glasses of iced water.

As well as our planned garden tidy up, Louis from St Michael's said he had a bit of a random job for us, and in true GoodGym Portsmouth fashion we agreed before finding out what it was! The team sprang in to action and did an epic job of splitting a large donation of dry dog food in to smaller bags for local residents to use. I'm not sure how the very specific 2.45 mugs of kibble per bag came in to being, but the end result looked very professional.

The other half of the team undertook some litter picking and weeding around the church site, and the flower beds were looking much neater and tidier by the end of the session.

Duncan has proved himself to be a master selfie-taker this evening, I might need to allocate him this role every week!

Sorry not sorry for the run report title 🤣

Today was the final round of the Eastney Health Centre triple challenge.

In the back garden: We transferred the top soil from the Hippo bags into the flower beds. There were wheelbarrows, shovels, trowels and crabbing buckets in use. After that it was watering, planting, re-watering and a touch of replanting (who put the lavender in the wrong place?!!).

In the front garden: Much fun involving building a decorating path with the excavated stones, more top soil, more watering, planting and watering.

We also had help from the YOU Trust, TMGP docs and patient participation group.

Big thanks to Dr Jo for the refreshments!