Massive kudos to the 16 people who showed up on a very cold night for this, our sixth instalment of HelpfulPeeps leafleting. Over the last year we've worked our way through Kingsdown/St Pauls, Victoria Park, Southville, Stapleton Road and Bedminster spreading the word about this Pay it Forward initiative where requests forof help are answered for free by a growing online community of HelpfulPeeps.

Tonight we were off to hit St Marks Road in Easton which meant a nice long 3k each way (plus an extra 1 or 2k for running between letterboxes :) ). This kept us pretty warm considering the sub-zero temperatures around us and we managed to cover a lot of ground by splitting into pairs and covering a street at a time.

But this wasn't all ...

We had received our own request for help from a valued member of our GG Bristol project community and being HelpfulPeeps ourselves, we quickly put together a team of 4 led by run leader Jack (thanks Jack!) so that we could send some assistance. Ann-Marie at Full Circle needed a sofa moving and a number of items packed away into a skip and in no time at all, the items were all taken care of.

On our return we made sure to congratulate Caroline and Kait for reaching 50 good deeds and qualifying for their highly prized black T shirts. Kait and Caroline have contributed massively to GG Bristol, both are very popular regulars on our Group Runs and Missions, and Kait has been running to her coach for some time now too so its really nice to be able to recognise allthis tonight. Sadly its Caroline's last week in Bristol before she heads off to Sheffield (and GG Sheffield!) but she's promised to come back and visit soon!

Thanks to Caroline for the pink wafers and party food at the bar tonight and to Daniel who kindly baked some delicious chocolate brownies for us all!

Thanks to Alice for the pun!

Three tasks tonight - and three explorers from Brent to join us in our endeavours; welcome to GG Bristol, GG Brent!

After a warm up we split into three groups and headed North with my group enjoying an extra lap and a half of Queen Square in order to put a bit more space between our 35 runners on the way through town.

Task One - The night Xanne says ni Shrubbery!

Our main task was to complete the removal of the shrubs outside our favourite charity warehouse at Emmaus. Thanks to Matt for supervising and leading this one while I dropped a group at Full Circle (see below!)

I'll be honest, I had completely underestimated how much was left on this task having missed the first session when we were here. The main shrub turned out to be a truly gargantuan specimen with some pretty savage thorns so it took a good while to chop it free and indeed at one stage it seemed to become sentient as it appeared to move of its own accord towards a nearby parked car - no doubt intending to take a spin around Bristol before branching off and making good its escape.

Special thanks to Tom for bringing along some extra tools and to the reinforcements from task two who pitched in at the end so we could hurriedly clear up after ourselves. The space looks quite a lot clearer now.

Task Two - Completing the Circle

Since we were in the vicinity with almost thirty pairs of hands, it seemed a shame not to drop a team at Full Circle to help Ann-Marie spruce up the outside courtyard. Charlie kindly led the effort, with the area looking completely transformed by the end - well done you guys!

Task Three - Helping Rita to organise the stock at North Bristol Community Project

Finally, Dave led a small group on the slightly longer run up to the NBCP to help locate some shelves and sort some of the items there. Sounds like there is still plenty to do so could be we'll have a few trips there over the next few months.

We ran out of time for Hill Reps again!

Just like last time, our last minute tidy up prevented us from getting in our hill reps up Spring Hill. I'm pleased to say that Matt did the notorious Strava segment on our behalf though - and as you can see from the photos, there is a change on the GG Bristol leaderboard!

On an unseasonably warm November evening 25 adventure-seeking runners met in Bristol to run a 3 mile round trip to the Children’s Scrapstore in St Werburghs to help them to work through a backlog of scrap sorting jobs.

After meeting at Vivo on the Welsh Back and doing a few farmyard related warm ups we headed off through the brizzle drizzle to our task. Being a large group meant that a few of us got caught at the traffic lights once or twice but this did not mean waiting in the cold, oh no, to keep warm the troops performed press ups, star jumps, and squats.

It wasn’t long before we arrived at the warehouse of wonder. The Scrapstore is an amazing place that takes waste from a wide range of businesses including telecoms companies, breweries and suitcase manufacturers, and turns them into useful items for children to use for arts and crafts, games and whatever else they can think of. After the unwanted items arrive at the Scrapstore they sometimes need to be processed to become useful. That was our task for the evening. The wonderful Kelly and her team had set up various stations for us to get to work cutting nets, burning through ropes, dismantling carpet samples and so much more. Everyone went right to work and stuck at it for a full 25 minutes. Richard was our cloth cutter extraordinaire, Ivo, our guest from London for the evening, took full charge of the heated cuttery thing, and Rachel was boss blade when it came to cutting thread from bobbins. After a lot of scraptivity our time was up, and we had achieved loads. After a cheeky floppy hat group photo we bid adieu to one of our favourite projects and ran on back to Queen Square.

There was still time left for a couple of laps of the square with some sprints to get the blood rushing before we stretched out and called it a night.

Thanks to everyone who came along, I had a great time and hope you did too. Remember there is a social at Kongs of King Street on Thursday from 6:30pm.

Gary

It was a tad wet and cold for this run, which was lucky as it was really really REALLY short.

We met up at Vivo, a slightly smaller group than usual due to the temperature and the rain, and headed off to Quakers Gardens where we met up with Hannah from Incredible Edible.

We'd helped at the garden before, much earlier in the year and it was amazing to see how it had transformed from a frankly dodgy little park in to a much nicer green space with a lot of mint growing in it.

Our tasks were to weed a big patch of garden, shift a load of soil to go on to the area we'd weeded, wheel the weeds away, and other weed related stuff. As there was lots to do, and it had taken us only a short while to run to the garden, we stayed for a long time and got loads and loads done - the initial flower bed was blitzed so we moved so other parts of the garden.

Once completed, we ran off, and due to the cold and the close proximity of our base camp, the pace went quickly from a gentle jog to an almost flat out sprint as we got in to Queen Square. It was decided that it was too cold for lunges, so we wrapped up a little early - whilst there had not been a huge amount of running, the work we got done was phenomenal!

Great work, everyone! P.S Apologies for the lack of photos - they're all terrible and blurry, plus my iPhone is refusing to sync with my PC at the moment.