An incredible 46 people turned up for tonight’s double task! Among them were the Considerate Craig and Brilliant Becki who had completed the Yorkshire Wolds Half Marathon on the weekend and Excellent Ed who achieved a 5k PB at Parkrun! As well as this, the Delightful Debs completed her 50th good deed today; make sure to give her a cheer. We also welcomed new starters Superb Sarah, Spectacular Sonja and Courageous Caron to the team!

We had two tasks to do today. I led out a group to Poppy Road to help with St Nicks meadow project whilst Tim led a longer group to St Oswalds Church to help dig up plants.

Tim’s group set to task trying to get some pesky roots up so St Oswalds can re-grass the boundary of their garden. Avoiding the beautiful fuchsia and a carefully cordoned off bees nest they got to task. Tristan had to call for hacksaw assistance when he came against a particularly tree-like root. Jeff however opted for the “yank till it comes out” strategy, dutifully watched by Stef’s best “if I stand here watching I don’t have to do work. Nicky and Jackie did their best work hyping up the difficult fern to dig up. Katie set to a more forensic approach of meticulously investigating every weed. The naughty GoodGymers digging up weeds round the back of the church managed to break a fork in the final minutes…it is unknown how as they apparently didn’t have much to do!

Meanwhile, my group went to Poppy Road to help local volunteers and Jonathon maintain the meadows. In our eagerness we arrived as John was setting up the tools, so we had to wait a few minutes. I started to explain the meadows, to which John was there to correct me…multiple times! The task was a GoodGym classic; scythe, rake, scrape, tidy. After a quick demonstration and safety briefing, we were on it and making quick work of the meadow. After half an hour, everyone already cleared a massive patch of meadow showing more people make quick work!

We are like locusts…I mean that in a good way! - Maddie

Aside from Laura finding a flying ant’s nest, the task went as smooth as can be! After forty minutes we bid farewell and made our way to Scarcroft Green for our fitness session.

We did a slightly modified version of 'Cones of Happiness'; everyone split off into 8 groups and further split into pairs (or threes) and were designated an exercise written on cones. As one person does the exercise, the other ran to a nearby tree and upon returning they swapped, after which they moved on to the next cone. Despite the heat, everybody gave it their all, especially on the dance where Laid-back Laurence casually did an amazing moon walk!

After the session we all congregated to Brigantes as per usual. Delightful Debs even brought flap jacks for us…she is a proper GoodGymer!!

This morning we crushed and bagged thousands of cans. Foil for Snappy had titled the area 'Mount Can', and that was really rather fitting.

Foil for Snappy might seem like a big local community organisation but really it's one woman, Karen, and her husband. They decided to recycle the foil cases from mince pies one December when they realised you could get cash for recyclable metal, and everything they raise is donated to S.N.A.P.P.Y (special needs activities and play provision York).

They have gone from mince pie cases to voluntarily looking after several aluminium recycling bins across the city and were tipped off about a can-filled courtyard.

This courtyard was like nothing any of us had ever seen, 25 years worth of hoarding cans. Piles of cans, bags of cans (within bags of cans), it was like the Russian Doll equivalent where every bag of cans you tipped out there was another bag of cans.

9 of us got crushing, carefully pulling out sneaky steel and bagging those separately.

if it's rusty, it's steel!

Within one hour we could see part of the ground and had filled 25 bags of crushed cans, but our pace accelerated as we'd emptied all the bags and could focus on crushing. I set a 30 minute challenge to finish the lot. Reckon we can do it?

Yes we CAN! (excited Katie)

This was not a clean task. Decade-old beer dregs, coke, tonic, a retro diet pepsi can that probably wouldn't be out of place in a museum. Drips of all sorts of liquid were flying everywhere. We were very relieved not to find anything too disgusting, just one giant spider and lots of snails.

1 hour and 30 minutes saw the courtyard cleared. A total of 43 bags of crushed metal and some very sticky feet.

Karen offered us some refreshing canned mineral water to finish, infinitely recyclable and much better than single-use plastic!

GG Yorkies walked and ran not a very long way at all to do two extremely local tasks!

'Fresh' from running the Race to the Stones 100k at the weekend, Mitch, Leanne, Tristan and Becky all made it and showed us their bling, they also all very sensibly joined the walking crew.

We had two tasks tonight, one was over at The Nose which is a community garden based at St Clement's Church. Nick led his running crew all of about 850m with Ellie and Laura as joint walking leaders.

The task was to weed and edge the beds and borders, pick any fruit and veg and deadhead the roses. Freya and first-time runner Immy were busy digging up loads of potatoes from the raised bed. Amy was tasked with clearing the weeds surrounding the raised beds, but mostly was digging up hundreds and thousands of woodlouse! The team quickly cleared all the weeds and tidied the edges of the flowerbed, creating lovely straight lines as far as the eye could see. As with any task involving fruit picking, there was also a lot of fruit eating with raspberries, gooseberries and blackcurrants on offer, mostly sampled by Ellie and Becky.

The blackcurrants are smokey? Ed

After deciding the blackcurrants seemed to be gently infused with the aroma of diesel, the 'Nose Team' headed round the corner to Scarcroft Green, Freya and Immy swinging the massive bucket of potato loot between them (kudos to Immy for carrying a huge bucket of potatoes all the way back on her first ever group run!)

My team, with Leanne as the walk leader and Debs as back marker, almost missed the school completely with everyone very enthusiastically running onto Scarcroft Green. Our task owner was our very own Tom FitzP. Tom had originally told me there would be around 4 tonnes of soil to shift, then a few days ago it was 6 tonnes and moving some logs... today there were lots of logs to move and create a log seating area with and around 8 tonnes of soil to barrow across and fill three giant raised beds.

The massive sacks didn't worry anyone and everyone got stuck in shovelling soil into wheelbarrows. It took all of about ten minutes to move the logs into a very specific shape.

Not a log circle, more like a log ellipse - Tom

We filled the large raised beds with 5 minutes to spare and even had time for a quick bonus litter pick on Scarcroft Green before the other team joined us for fitness.

It's like Cones of Joy, but in teams and with optional running!

We need to come up with a better name for tonight's fitness game but basically teams of four tackled ten stations with a whole bunch of exercises to choose from, and in transition between each station you could choose to be a sleeping lion or to go for a sprint to an inanimate object on the Green.

Being a sleeping lion is a trick, getting up is so hard - Leanne

Pretty much everyone's favourite exercises was resistance running with bands, apart from probably Ed who was subjected to a serious band slap by Nick - so loud that everyone heard it above the music.

On our return, Huw surprised the 100km runners with an amazing commemorative cake with little stones on it and everything.

Next week Mitch is the boss, have fun!

There was SO MUCH GOOD to report on this group run.. I know you all love a round number so check these ones out:

• Pete ran 50 miles on Saturday, just because
• Huw was awarded GG Yorkie of the Month for June because he did his 100th good deed AND ran 100 miles (in one go) and probably made 100 cakes too
• Paul Kelly ran his 100th good deed and got to wear the awesome Centurion Cape as well as pretending to be superman
• Legendary Leanne ran her 400th good deed and is officially the goodest person in the whole of the North

We welcomed along no less than 5 new runners and we split into two groups to tackle two tasks. It turns out there was a lot of animal-related activity at both tasks.

Leanne and Tim led a group to St Paul's allotment for a final massive weeding session. Poorly Paul turned up on his crutches and was in charge of photography. The team saw some frogs and found a truly enormous moth which attached itself to Mitch and has been (probably) identified as a Lady Moth.

The ladies do love Mitch

My team ran over to Hob Moor to extract more thistles from the cow field. On our way we saw two lovely puppies and once on the field, had several near misses - and one hit - with dog poo. Our goal was to fill two bags but since Aidan pulled up a thistle so large that it basically filled a whole bag, we finished on four bags.

The pun could be "Three Bags Full!" ..except, four

Paul Kelly in his cape led the run back across the Moor where some rogue dogs had frightened the cows so we slowed down to let the cows pass in front and avoid any trampling.

Use your cape! Be a matador!

Both teams completed a EMOTM workout (but we had a friendly dog who stopped Jeff from doing his star jumps) with several repeats of one minute on the clock to complete a series of exercises.

Then there was loads of cake, and everyone was super happy.