First of all, welcome to Craig who chose a particularly crazy night to come along to GoodGym as we celebrated our FIRST BIRTHDAY

In other firsts.... Craig & Sarah both ran their first marathons - Craig at London and Sarah at Southampton on Sunday. Top marks for effort! Sarah's top tip for recovering from a marathon is to dance to the finish line bands to ease out the legs - it seemed to work for her.

In celebratory style, there were plenty of party hats to go around (Tony finally got to wear the 50 good deeds cap), a headcount to make sure everyone's brains were working and a short run over to Manor Infant School to work in the very overgrown garden.

• Thanks to Ashley for running with us and having us back to the school.
  

The team set to work quickly, weeding the beds, cleaning the polytunnel and attempting to mow the grass (the enthusiasm of goodgym was not matched by the mower which refused to cut the grass after 2 lengths of the garden).

• Rosie, Angela and Sarah made a new friend in the polytunnel, I'm not sure what that spider will make of the new tidy area but hopefully it will still have plenty of flies to eat!
  
• We managed to make a compost pile as tall as Sam.
• Judy and Vicki were put to work identifying plant vs weed.
  

Everyone worked hard shifting weeds and grasses, picking up rubbish and digging over the planting beds. You could definitely see the difference by the end of the task.

Once the equipment had all been wheeled back out of the way we had a couple of party games involving balloons. As usual, plenty of laughter and a few moves that are designed to improve running speed... stealth plyometrics disguised as a party game! And lots of photos. Thanks Laura for the action photos.

Back at the community centre it was time for cakes, complete with 1 candle and for a good number of us who didn't have crazy early starts, a lovely curry from our friends at Pannchi round the corner.

The celebrations continue on Friday at 7pm in Somerstown Hub. Details are here. More food, a quiz and the raffle draw - not to be missed!

There are also 2 community missions on Saturday. One in the morning at the Bubble Rush in Southsea and one around Southsea in the afternoon

Then next week the party hats will be packed away and we'll be heading up the road to an old favourite.... helping sort donations at Naomi House charity shop.

It was great to go back to where it all started tonight and think about all the good deeds we have done in the space of 52 weeks = 930 of them in total!! Angela was with us at the start and has written a blog for GoodGym about the positive impact being part of GoodGym has had on her mental health - read that here - it's well worth 5 minutes of your time.

Good numbers at GoodGym Portsmouth this evening... great to see everyone. Plenty of chat and laughter too.

We welcomed Rasha for her first ever group run, and she only thought she was turning up to do a doc check! We also welcomed Rachel for her first run with us, she first ran with GoodGym in Cardiff but now lives down our way. She was also christened Welsh Rachel to differentiate herself from Rachel C who we welcomed back from her Aussie adventure. We also had 2 Sophies with us tonight so they are from here on known as Queen Sophie and Normal Sophie.... this is what happens when you let people choose their own nicknames!

Having a ball

Ashley ran us round to Manor Infants where he had very kindly arranged some indoor tasks - the first was touching up the walls and the skirting. We love a double entendre here in Pompey so that really set the scene for when we started the other task which was clearing out & tidying the PE cupboard - we had saggy balls, balls that were too hard, ball sacks, lumpy balls, balls that needed pumping up - you name it there were plenty of ball related quotes of the night. Once everything had been sorted and was being loaded back into the cupboard there was even a comment about being back in the closet! If you look at the photos you will also see that Lara and Lou have been (self)nominated as playground friends and they very fetching they look too in the yellow cap.

How many GoodGym runners does it take...

...to put together a goal with no instructions? The answer appears to be greater than 16 as we didn't quite manage to work out what pieces went where!

Squats lunge got to do with it?

As it was face-freezingly cold and we are a group of (mostly) southern softies, we did our fitness session inside our room in the community centre. I was impressed that for once we actually left a task in time to do a full fitness session! There were many excellent efforts on the agility ladder, some gorgeous grapevines and skips on the drills station, groaning efforts coming from tricep dip corner and some good air on the squat jumps.

Awesome work from everyone, hope you're not too sore tomorrow!

Next week we are outside so wrap up warm as we return to St Faiths, site of the bindweed battle. And there will be a final chance to bag some good deeds for the January challenge on Thursday 31 January with a plog at Hilsea, meeting at the Rugby Club/Covers car park.