With the news that GoodGym Leeds had just passed it's half-birthday (in isolation) also came a new challenge! As we have welcomed 182 different people to a GoodGym session since our launch, the challenge this week was to honour every single one of our runners, by completing 182 strength moves.

182 is a pretty big number for anyone, so I left it pretty open for you all to decide whether to do them in one go, to split it into several workouts, etc, so here's a flavour of what everyone got up to!

First up we have Liz, with her yoga-inspired workout. Along with most of our entrants, Liz chose a variety of different exercises, with her workout featuring lunges, side planks and downward dog, complete with some lovely daffodils!

Next up we have Katie and Rach, who both completed the same workout, planned by Katie. It featured a full body workout with legs, arms and core exercises, utilising cans of food instead of weights in Katie's case. I particularly enjoyed the use of the 2 minute plank to make the total up to 182. I wonder who exactly those two minutes represented (and did you think about them for the whole two minutes?!Home

Katie Video

Adam spent Wednesday afternoon spamming my inbox with videos of his workouts. It sounds like he's been busy at work and so this has been a welcome break for him. Adam's workout involved loads of compound moves (with accompanying serious faces), including wall sits with bicep curls, Squats with bicep curls, and one exercise that can only be described as the "Bent over row while showing off the inner thigh". Enjoy that one GoodGymers!

Adam

Jenny is up next, with her adventurous workout. She included handstands, russian twists, mounatin climbers and dead bugs! Luckily, her home situation means she has a parnter to act as cameraman, so I was expecting big things with her submission. It sounds like she spent as much time laughing about her exercises as actually doing them, which I think is a win!

Jenny's workout

Heather went for a fairly simple set of exercises and after the first round found it all a bit too easy.

"I don't think I've set myself enough of a challenge" Heather

Luckily, for the rest of the sets, I made sure Jasper was getting in her face making everything a bit more tricky, and to make sure she didn't feel like her workout lacked difficulty. I also got to pick the final two glory exercises to make it up to 182, and was treated to two perfect burpees.

Last but not least was Alastair, who was my favourite of the lot. Not only did he stick to just one exercise (deadlift squats), but he chose a novel way of breaking up his reps, by increasing the reps in line with the Fibonacci sequence! Nice! I bet it started fairly easy, but by the time you reached that set of 55 it must have been awful!

Now the observant amongst you will have noticed that I didn't include myself in the write up this week. I set myself the challenge of completing 182 press-ups in about 48 hours, and considering I never do press-ups it was going to be a pretty big ask. By Tuesday evening I'd completed 112, meaning I had 70 left, but then I was unwell on Wednesday and spent most of the day in bed, so my attempt ultimately ended in failure! BUT I think it's just as important to acknowledge your failures as well as your successes, and I'll probably give it another go next week!

Have a great weekend everyone, enjoy the sunshine if you can (at an appropriate distance to others) and keep your eyes peeled for next week's challenge.

Tonight's run included our longest ever run (by some runners), some orienteering style skills, hundreds of books, and an appreciation of some incredible art. 24 runners came together for a bit of a check up on the Leeds Little Free Libraries, with a fun build-your-own workout thrown in too!

Tonight involved lots of pre-run admin, with loads of different route choices on offer from a round trip of around 5k to over 15k! This meant we kept the news brief, but well done to anyone who ran at Liversedge Half at the weekend, some brilliant running in tough conditions.

We had one new runner joining us this week, welcome Sarah! We also had a Caroline on her first visit to us from Sheffield, and a few faces back for the second week. Great to have you all!

The plan for tonight's run was to split up into small groups, and try and reach as many of the Little Free Libraries as possible. They're all quite spread out, so it was no easy task! After deciding how far they wanted to run, everyone formed into groups with an assigned leader who had a map in hand and a little condition sheet. Some groups were heading for just one box, others two different boxes, and one group was trying to hit three in one session!

The Little Free Libraries are an amazing resource, that as the name says are completely free! They're essentially small cupboards that are spread about all over Leeds, and the idea is that you can borrow a book, or leave a book that you no longer want or need, and it just creates an amazing book-sharing community that hopefully gives more people more access to books.

When a group arrived at the box they had a few things on their list to check: * Is the perspex window free of cracks? * Is the post/wall mount secure? * Is the door in good condition? * Are the shelves loose or damaged? * Is there any other obvious damage?

Then they had to count the books in the library and it was time to build their own workout! The number of books defined the number of reps they had to do, and they would pick their own exercises, 3 in total. If you only went to one box, you did 3 x the number of books, with the reps reducing for the numbers of boxes visited. Easy! (Once I'd explained it a few times!) This was a great excuse for me to turn the fitness session over to the group to see what sort of exercises you would choose to do, and it's really interesting to see what you all came up with!

With everyone off in different directions, each group had their own challenges tonight. Some groups had big distances to cover, others had city-centre traffic to negotiate and others had some complicated navigation through winding suburban streets. For Paola, in only her second week, she loved the opportunity to challenge herself, picking the longest route on offer:

"I just thought, why not push myself?!" That's the spirit Paola!

As each group arrived at their boxes, they mostly found that they were in great condition, with only a few minor defects to reports. Mostly they were all pretty well stocked, with a good number of books and they all had some amazing artwork.

"Looks pretty spankers new" Riobhne

"The painting is glorious!" Adam

Then it was time for the workout! The books were counted, with reps therefore ranging from 18 to 50! It was great to hear afterwards how loads of you had made use of your surroundings incorporating the urban landscape into your drills. There were some repeats in the workouts but you did all of these amazing exercises:

*Push ups *Squats *Star jumps *Boxing punches *Wall sit *Step overs *Single leg romanian deadlift *Toe taps *Tricep dips *Lunges *Reverse lunges *Dynamic balance (writing with toes) *Pull ups

Unbelievable stuff! I'm very impressed with the variety in the exercises, and in most cases they looked like they were well thought-through with a mix of different muscles worked.

Everyone made their way back to base, in some cases finding the hills that little bit harder on the way back! One group even used the fair that is set up right near our base as a beacon to guide their way home. Beautiful!

We all reconvened back at base, with a healthy group stopping for a quick drink to swap stories catch up on the evenings events. Another fab session everyone, hope you all enjoyed it!

*With the stormy weather putting people off, a small but perfectly formed group of 16 headed down to growing better to help prepare an area for wildflower planting *

While the worst off the weather seemed to have passed us (for now at least) it was obviously enough to convince some people to give tonight a swerve, but not this hardy lot! There were almost as many newbies as regulars, which was brilliant to see, with many of our first timers coming along as part of Leeds University's Student Volunteering Week. We welcomed Manos, Rebecca, Ian, Ping Chen,Huang, Paola, Jaswinder and Charlotte. Give them big cheer!

It was very cold tonight, but after a quick warm up we were raring to go! Alex took up backmarking duties, making sure nobody was left behind, while the rest of taskforce took on the newly created position (by Adam) of middle monitors. It was lovely to hear all the chatter on the way down with lots of new faces mingling with our regulars and fitting right in like they've been here every week. It's what we love to see!

We arrived at Growing Better to find Dorota ready and waiting for us with a wheelbarrow full of tools. We had a couple of tasks lined up, with most of the group turning over a big section of overgrown grass and weeds, while the rest of the group would head over to clear a path of brambles, as an alternative to traipsing across the soggy field (where someone always manages to slip and end up covered in mud!)

Everyone grabbed their tools and made a start. Initial attempts did not look promising with everyone struggling to make progress. With a a bit of determination though, things started to turn around (well, over). As with a lot of GoodGym tasks, the group discovered it was all about the tools you ended up with. Luckily, taskforce were on hand to keep everyone in check.

"So this is a shovel, it's for scooping than digging, you'll be much better off with a spade" Rachel, proving that every day is a school day.

"Guys, if there are any more forks, you should grab them! They are so much easier!" Katie, demonstrating perfect forking technique (before she almost stabbed herself in the foot with one).

Meanwhile, the bramble clearing team appeared to have discovered that there wasn't very much for them to do, and the brambles had all just died in the cold weather. It does beg the question as to why we hadn't been using the perfectly good path the whole time to get to the allotment! At least we know for next time! This group got on with moving around some ground covers that had been blown around in the stormy weather before rejoining the rest of the group.

They returned to find newbie Ian was now a master with a pick axe and had made loads of progress by himself! He didn't seem too fussed about how much he got done, and was just enjoying being outside digging.

"I'm just loving the smell!" Ian

With a big area turned over, it was time to call it quits for the evening, but not before a quick fitness session.

The runners got into pairs and the idea was simple, one runner would do an exercise (squats, lunges or star jumps) and the other would do a shuttle run to the end of the car park and back before swapping over. Easy! Runners realised that the the slower they ran the shuttle run, the more squats their partner would have to do, but unsurprisingly they were giving it their all and working hard to get back as quick as they could.

After a quick 5 minute workout everyone was ready for the long slog back up the hill. We said our goodbyes to Dorota before heading back to base, praying for red lights to give us a break up the hill!

We all reconvened back at base for a debrief and stretch, with some sticking around at the pub for some rehydration and refuelling.

Sometimes (ok most of the time) GoodGym is exactly what you want it to be. Tonight was one of those nights. It was a super-fun physical task, everyone was in a great mood, and it was just a great evening!

There was loads of news to share. While we'd just slipped out of the top division in the January Challenge, tonight's group run promised to bring us back into the Gold division (as I write this we're in 15th)! We have loads going on at the minute, and it's great to see so many getting involved.

We also had a string of people hitting their 10th Good Deeds this weekend, with Alex, Julie and Rachael all hitting double figures. We also had four newbies, with Brogan, Rob, Naomi and Eimear joining us for the first time! That's a big number of people who deserve a massive cheer, so go and give them some love!

Tonight's run was down to Meanwood Valley Urban Farm, who are starting to make big plans with the things we can do for them, which is awesome!

We started out with a quick 'Big Wave' warm up to show off to all the new GoodGymers how coordinated we are (I think we can agree this is still a work in progress).

We then set off down the hill towards the farm, with Helen backmarking. We arrived to find Ben, the task owner was all ready and waiting for us. He had three pretty massive jobs for us to do:

• Dig a big trench, around 2 feet wide, and about 10 metres long
• Move around 40 bags of gravel/sand across to the hole
• Move a huge pile of soil from one polytunnel to another.

It was a super ambitious list of tasks that looked impossible at first, but for this group impossible is not a declaration. It's a dare. Impossible is potential. (Kudos to anyone who knows the quote!)

So we all just got on with it! We split into groups, with hole diggers, bag movers and wheelbarrow shuttlers, and we just started grafting! And boy did we work! There were some serious effort faces, grunts and sighs as everyone really put their back into what was a serious workout.

"This is harder work than my pump class" Julie, Leeds GoodGymer

The diggers were really taking it seriously, even if some tools were perhaps more suited to sandcastles than trench digging! Some people were also getting pretty defensive about the section they'd been digging, and didn't want to move on to a new area.

"I'm quite protective of my hole" Naomi, first timer immediately getting into the swing of saying something inappropriate enough to make the run report.

The whole idea with digging the hole is that next week we're going to come back and fill the trench with rubble, which will be the foundations for a retaining wall (made from the sand- and gravel-bags). It's a massive job, that the regular volunteers just don't have the time or the capacity to do.

"What you've done tonight would have taken me about 2 or 3 weeks of serious drudgery!" Ben, task owner.

Once the gravel bags had been shifted, and most of the trench had been dug, a splinter group split off to move the soil. There was a constant stream of wheelbarrows from one polytunnel to the other with the pace not letting up despite all the hard work that had already been put in.

With the jobs all coming to a close, the tools were collected in, and everyone had a chance to admire their handiwork. It is still genuinely amazing to see the amount that can be achieved by a big group of people who are keen to work hard, and even better to see the smiles on everyone's faces the whole time too!

The run back was up the hill we'd come down, so we let everyone take it at their own pace. Tom took the lead group, with Adam taking up back-marking duties. We all reconvened back at base, with a few stretches led by Julie and Helen.

Thanks again for a fabulous evening, I was bouncing along on my way home tonight! You're all brill!