Tonight 11 Brighton Goodgymmers offered a very warm welcome to Megan joining us for the first time, to make us a merry band of 12 get fitter by doing gooders!

We’d barely started our run when we arrived at our destination, Dorset Gardens where we met St James’s Community Action Group member David ready and waiting with a variety of tools to get us to work.

A last minute change of plan to our digging task had us focussing mainly on tackling a variety of weeds including the satisfyingly easy to remove ‘sticky’ and the slightly more difficult to dig up ‘bog’. Many of these weeds were growing around the base of some temporary fence panels that were no longer needed and were in danger of making these unsightly metal barriers a permanent fixture. Once enough weeds had been weeded the fences were liberated and carried to their new temporary home, ready for collection and removal. David was very grateful for our efforts and thanked us for making a big difference to this well used local communal area.

Task complete we headed off for a seafront run towards the Marina pausing to survey the route of ‘The Weakest Link’, a popular relay race held on June 19th where teams of four run 2.5km as a relay and then join up to run the same 2.5km route together as a team. It’s a great evening out, you get to mingle with other local runners. Nobody takes it seriously, there’s only about 2 teams that actually try to win it, everyone else just has a fun night of running, it really is for everyone. The more the merrier, let us know if you're coming here and thanks to Helena for organising.

A fitness session involving squats, skater lunges, burpees, mountain climbers, hill sprints and planks, where passers-by may have been wondering what on earth was causing me to shout

Bum up, bum down, no bananas!

rounded off the evening and now you are all slightly fitter than you were yesterday!

Don’t forget its our parkrun meet up at Hove Park on Saturday. And next week we’ll be enjoying our monthly social where social secretary Nipun gets to perform her final act in this vital role and choose one last pub for us to go to before she heads off to pastures new. Our loss will be Goodgym Richmond’s gain!

A big Brighton Goodgym welcome to Clare & Daniel joining us for the first time tonight, its great to have you along and we hope we’ll see you again. It was also good to see Madeleine back after a few months off. Welcome back!

And a huge Brighton Goodgym Congratulations to Sherman who has reached the amazing milestone of 50 good deeds. That’s a fantastic achievement and he now joins a select club of only a few Brighton Goodgymmers to have reached the magic 50! We look forward to seeing you in your black t-shirt next week! And I wonder who will be next?!

Just a a short run to our task tonight where we met David from the St James’s Community Action Team. They have received some funding from Pride in the Community to refresh some large raised beds at the bottom of Upper Rock Gardens, but before they replant them, they needed some soil improver added to get the new plants off to the best start. So armed with shovels, spades and forks our task was to shift and shovel a half tonne of muck into the raised beds. As it was a small working area we split into 2 groups with one group working whilst the other ran around the block before swapping over. After about 20 minutes we’d got the job done, leaving the beds ready for planting, I look forward to seeing how they look in a few days once they've been planted up.

With plenty of time for a fitness session we headed to Dorset Gardens for a session all about agility and plyometrics. First we took on the Illinois agility test, designed to bring out those nimble, sprightly and fast feet as you negotiated some tight turns and weaved your way through a course of cones.

Next we had a series of plyometric relay races jumping and hopping over cones, which produced some nail biting photo finishes between the 2 evenly matched teams. Plyometrics are great exercises for runners, anything with small, light hops and jumps is fantastic for strengthening muscles and tendons and helping you develop a spring in your step to get those feet moving quickly when you run.

Hopefully see some of you at our monthly parkrun meet up this Saturday where we will need maximum spring in our step to get us up that lovely big hill. Breakfast at The Bevy after!