18 Goodgym Yorkies descended on Rawcliffe park for a night of assorted good deeding. The first task required 3 brave souls who would be happy to head out into the dark woods with only their headtorches for guidance. Up stepped Tim, Egg and Elyse, with Tim boldly claiming that he could navigate his way using the stars. With such orienteering skills on show the team set off with bolt-cutters to repair a fence around the park that had been neglected over the years.

Our second team, complete with honorary GG Yorkie - Katie's Dad, were armed with loppers and spades and told to get to work on a bit of cycle path at the entrance to the park and ride that had become well hidden. The area was so overgrown that before long the team had revealed an additional metres width of long lost cycle path

And the third team of GGers set to work on a solid pile of stone with some mattocks. This was then shovelled into barrows and used to restore a path. Lizzie, who wasn't in the most sensible of footwear and Val, who was lacking a headtorch, would only go so far with their wheelbarrows before their lack of provisions limited them. But the team still got the job done.

Before long groups 2 and 3 had returned back to base. But still no sign of our woodland adventurers. Could it be that Tim wasn't the expert navigator he proclaimed to be? We were getting ready to send out a search party, until some distant headtorches started getting nearer and nearer. With everyone back safe we had time for a quick group photo before heading off into the night

A mammoth crew including four new runners came along for another two-task night at GoodGym York

We celebrated a massive weekend of racing with new parkrun PBs, new 10 mile PBs and completion of the English Cross Country National Championships - phew!

Mitch led out the 10km crew for a final hurrah at Rawcliffe whist I led the 4km crew to New Walk for a bench cleaning and path-widening challenge. Craig and Tim were our back-markers today, thanks chaps.

We arrived at the start of New Walk to be met by Win, with lots of buckets of soapy water and a few spades. Those who were logging their run wondered where the remaining kilometres were going to come from since it had only been 1km to the start.

It's the bench cleaning relay!

Working in pairs, runners took turn to either scrub the really mucky benches or scrape back the edges of the cycle path, whilst their partner walked, ran or sprinted to Blue Bridge and back. They swapped continuously for 15 minutes, before I switched the running bit to 20 squats, and then 10 lunges.

Lunges? How? It's my first time

Yes that's right. It was a momentous occasion for Jessie doing her first ever lunges and we made sure she had the technique nailed with perfectly angled knees and everything. Nick was going rogue with side lunges and Leanne was practising her balance by lunging down the white line in the middle of the cycle path. Lots of people stopped to ask what on earth we were up to and one man just spontaneously burst into lunges.

Mitch's team ran 5km along the Ouse and arrived at Rawcliffe to finish off the giant task of filling in the wetpour hole. They were tasked with filling the old hardcore site with 7 tonnes of soil; which will then be reseeded so there is full grass cover. In usual GG fashion, they dug out as much soil as possible until the bags were ‘draggable', then hauled them across to tip them out.

Ed apparently tried to start a rave with the music from the nearby fitness session (not ours) and started to dance but Emily was the only one who joined in with him, gutted. The task was finished quickly and the team boshed back along the river.

Last person to finish the run buys the round! - Craig, before realising he was the back marker

With the benches seriously cleaned up and hundreds of metres of cycle path widened, our work was done.

It's a trick, there's more fitness

Oh yes, we still had a few circuits to do in Tower Gardens:

• high steps
• skipping
• sprints
• elbow to knee walk/jog (Amy's choice)
• mountain climbers
• tricep dips
• press ups

..and with all that done, we headed back for a rest!

Another two-task Monday for the GG Yorkies!

It had been a weekend of brilliant running with 5k parkrun PBs happening all over the place, half marathon PBs at Harewood House, 30k epics and mountain adventures, but that didn't stop Paul leading one group on a huge 10k run to Rawcliffe Bar Country Park whilst Becky led a 5.5km group to Heworth Holme.

We welcomed along a new runner John, husband of GG Yorkie Lauren. He thought he'd sensibly picked the shorter route but had worn shiny clean trainers and nobody had told him that the shorter run always has a longer fitness session...

At Rawcliffe Bar, the task was to continue digging up hardcore from the spot we'd previously removed the wetpour from. The hardcore needed to be shifted under three benches in the play area, but first the ground needed to be lined with weedguard.

Carl was on hand to cut the membrane very precisely and was busy comparing the leg length of the different benches, which didn't really impact on the membrane cutting whatsoever, but it's always nice to know the different heights of benches anyway.

At Heworth Holme, half the group were tasked with digging up and bagging soil from mounds which had been formed from the creation of wildlife scrapes. After Bec quickly discovered that you definitely don't want to step in the scrapes because they're extremely boggy, it only took the team about ten minutes to fill all the bags.

We need more bags!

Luckily the other half of the group had stolen some bags which they didn't need. They were tasked with digging more wildlife scrapes and err... making more mounds of soil.

Is this another task which Jonathan has just made up?!

The wildlife scrapes and wetland area will be amazing once finished, but it's a process and the digging and bagging will continue for a while. With every blue bag in sight filled, the bagging team shifted all the bags to the entrance and started helping with the scrapes. Helen gave a handy explanation of the task:

Gotta dig this sludge, put it over there

We waited until everyone had really, really dirty and wet feet before finishing up and running back to base, where a little core session followed.

I LOVE mountain climbers (possibly sarcastic Leanne)

We grabbed all the long run team's bags and transported them to the pub ready for collection. Huw had made some lovely flapjack and we even saved them some of that too. They weren't too far behind us though and Paul Kelly's summary when I asked how it was said it all.

It was hardcore.

History was made as GoodGym York reached a total of 500 good deeds today for the month of January - which still has a week left to go! How many more can we do??

Wheelbarrows full of lovely tools awaited us including some shiny new mattocks. We love new tools! Our tasks tonight included ripping up the last of the wetpour from our previous visit then mattocking out the hardcore underneath; digging out the turf from under some picnic benches; laying a weed membrane and then putting the mattocked-out hardcore on top.

Team wetpour got stuck in, knowing that this time they didn't have to worry about cutting it into manageable sized pieces as it was going straight in the skip. They dug out such a huge piece that it took about 10 bodies to transport it over to the skip. It looked like a piece of Tarmac road had grown lycra-clad legs and was walking across the field. The turf digging team weren't sure they would be able to dig the frozen ground but found it wasn't too solid and at least the bits of turf stayed in nice big clumps which were much easier for chucking into the wheelbarrows which were then trundled into the darkness where the turf was tossed over a fence. Once the ground had been dug out and stomped down Lizzie got to work cutting the ghostly white membrane roughly to size (although it turned out to be a bit too "roughly" so we had to cut an extra piece to fill the gap). There was only one pair of scissors so we thought Lizzie's surgeon hands would be the safest and she made a good job of cutting the membrane to shape around the picnic bench which was fixed to the ground, making things a lot harder.

Once Lizzie and I had very carefully folded the remaining membrane into a lovely neat square we moved over to help the mattock crew who were furiously swinging their tools and hitting the ground making some wonderful sparks, to the sounds of "oooh" and "aaaah" as if it was 5th November again. Good job they were all equipped with safety goggles as the stones were flying in all directions (some even into Nick's mouth). During pauses when the mattocking crew had a rest, myself, Lizzie, Vicky and a few others quickly shovelled up the hardcore into wheelbarrows which was then put onto the membrane around the picnic bench. We had some interesting conversations about dating whilst we were working and learnt some interesting facts about Ed! It's amazing what you learn about your fellow GoodGymers whilst you are working away. Another team started work digging out the turf from around the next picnic bench whilst Nikki and Becky finished off digging the turf from around one of the benches.

We didn't get to finish the whole job, as there's a lot more mattocking to be done to get all that lovely hardcore up - preferably when the ground is a bit less frozen. We will be back soon!