This week it was a return to the Brown Books shop for another session pushing this community bookshop one step closer to re-opening.

On the way there, David and Chrisshane worked together on Chrisshanes week 4 of Couch to 5k, doing a loop with four 5 minute runs with walking rests in between. Chrisshane is doing fantastically at building her running stamina!

Completing the run on arrival at the shop the rest of the gang were hard at work sorting the space out. All the books and other stuff had arrived from storage and needed putting out on shelves. Masking tape needed peeling, paint splashes on the floor needed scrubbing up and the whole floor mopped clean of all the building grime from the last week.

We soon transformed the shop from what looked like a junk shop of piles of boxes and bits, into a clean, spacious area ready to be arranged to entice readers in to browse the books.

From mindfulness to mangoes, the festival had it all

We attended the annual Cambridge Wellness Festival to promote GoodGym and encourage more people to get active and give back 🫶

We had some brilliant conversations with people attending the festival about the wellbeing benefits of GoodGym, and with local organisations about future community missions.

Whilst there, we had to try out some of the activities on offer, so Caroline jumped at the chance to try some inclusive cycling with bikeworks and I did some guided meditation. In need of some refreshment, we went for a smoothie, the catch being that we had to mix it ourselves by peddling furiously on stationary bikes. Cue a little GoodGym competition 💪

Big shout out to David from GoodGym Luton who flagged the festival - quite literally, by sharing the info with us and bringing the GoodGym flag! 🚩

Stormy weather prompted a change of task this week as we were scheduled to paint dugouts at the 61 Football Club, but instead we went for indoor painting as the refurbishment of the Brown Books community bookshop nears completion.

On arrival, we swept up after the carpenters and had a quick workout using paint cans and sharing physio exercise tips for building knee strength.

We had yellow and green paint to apply to different parts of the walls so we got the rollers going and began the transformation from stark white.

We didn't quite get it all finished but made a good dent in it, ready to finish off next time around!

We teamed up with Friends of Leagrave Park for our monthly litter pick. Thank you to Pastor Charmaine, Martin, Dave and Omar, plus other members of the community, we managed to make the park that bit prettier. Amongst the haul was a particular tortoise, a ‘message’ in a bottle and the famous drum kit.

Let’s hope that the tortoise is still breathing, wherever he may be.

This week's group run took us to the Capability Green business park where the task was to deliver flyers to all the businesses inviting them to use their corporate volunteering time to help the Keep Luton Tidy campaign on an upcoming litter picking day.

Splitting into two groups we whizzed around the park pretty quick which left plenty of time for some hill reps before we returned to our start point.