Over 210 children took part in Swadlincote Junior parkrun on Sunday 14 June, with smiles, speed, and plenty of energy all around. GoodGym’s very own Brenda joined the volunteer crew as a barcode scanner—keeping things running smoothly while cheering on the runners. It was a brilliant day, full of fun, fast feet, and fantastic community spirit.

Today's 5km Shindig run took Katie, Ilana, Maxime and Sevan on a run through Donisthorpe Canalside Park, taking in lots of different road surfaces. Dirt, tarmac, gravel and rocky roads gave everyone a lot of variety. There was a surprise too running along the Ashby Canal, when they discovered the base camp of the American Civil War reenactment group on the way.

There were quite a few hills, some of them Cheeky, which were conquered and everyone enjoyed the scenic route that ended up being 5.8km in total.

Today we had our 1 millonth event and it's all down to volunteers who turn up every week like Jimmy at Braunstone and Jeanette and Dave at watermead who make the world 🌎 a better place well done all.

Along with the mass of GoodGym runners and walkers descending on Conkers parkrun, 3 of the group helped to run the event too. Louise arrived first to help set up the course, which allowed her to run it too. Sevan was there at the end as one of today's timekeepers (surprisingly, both were in sync throughout) and Brenda took on the role of Walkleader at a parkrun where they can have up to 80 of them taking in the gently undulating course.

With the GoodGymers, including Ivo who finished 6th, there were 490 finishers recorded. As well as getting the finishers safely around the course, everyone met the extremely friendly locals and got some local flavour and recommendations for the weekend.

Today Jimmy had a nice ride out to visit Mr R who had asked for some assistance with general weeding and garden clearance.

Jimmy met up with Mr R and they chatted about the best use of the time available to ensure Mr R could use his garden as he was unable to keep up with the weeding.

We agreed that I should remove the weeds between the slabs to create a safer accessible space for him to sit out.

Jimmy really enjoyed this little mission and Mr R was grateful that jimmy had managed to make his garden more usable, I think another visit is needed just to finish it off to complete the whole garden.

Written by Jimmy

What started as a wet soggy weather day ended in beautiful blue sky sunshine. Nick and Jen joined a few other volunteers from CRT to tackle the pennywort that was starting to build up along the River Soar at Barrow upon soar. After a safety briefing it was all systems go: bounancy aids on and we were then climbing into canoes eager to paddle off. Before we could that there was the Barrow Deep Lock to navigate. Our timing wasn't best as we had to wait for four boats to pass through the Lock, going on both directions it took more than 40 minutes before we could ho through ourselves. Once through the Lock, it was easy to spot the patches of pennywort. Using rakes and hands we pulled what seemed like tons of the stuff into the canoe then disposed of it on the bank. After a few hours the section of river was cleared and we paddled back to base pleased with our efforts.