What a lovely run! It was hot for the first part as a seemingly endless horde of runners left Vivo Gym to run to the Childrens Scrapstore to sort...er... scrap! We found a great rhythm and were soon in the labyrinthine Scrapstore.

We were given several tasks to do - make toys safe by removing batteries, tags and other stuff, cutting up lengths of rope with a heated knife that smelt quite pungent, cutting up netting and fabric (which looked like a massive old tent!), taking thread from industrial sized cotton reels, and the GoodGym classic of taking water damaged phones out of boxes and sorting them in to their component parts - note that we've been to the Scrapstore around 8-10 times and every time we've had those phones to deal with. Well, they are NO MORE! The last 6 boxes were sorted. Phew!

As always at the Scrapstore, we found a variety of random and unexpected items - this time it was a cage full of shop floor dummy legs! These were used in our group photo at the end, and whilst there was a bit of a faff to get them back in to the warehouse, we warmed up by running up and down on the kerb just outside.

Running back was more pleasant - the heat had abated somewhat and we cooled off in Queens Square with a few exercises for our core, and a lovely lying down stretch sequence. As it had been my birthday the day before, the gang spared no expense and presented me with one of the Scrapstore phones, a tuft of rope and a bit of glitter. It almost brought a tear to my eye...

Massive mchugebig congratulations to Richard for making it to the grand number of 100 runs with GoodGym, and also belated happy birthday to my birthday twin Alex, who was also celebrating the day before!

23 up and at em runners met at Vivo on Tuesday to run and basically move a massive mound of manure. A big welcome to Kate and Debs who joined us for their first run, and a bit of a 'keep it up' to Paul for whom this was his 98th run!

The rain threatened us but held off as we headed up the lovely but busy Bristol to Bath Path, a cunning hill disguised as a bit of flat, and ended up at Easton Community Gardens where the pile of poo awaited us, as well as some weeding and some grass sheering too. The question that Christina, our contact that the Garden, had on her lips was... could we shift all that... er.. guano in time?

The gang set to the task knowing we'd be running off again very soon, and grabbed spades, forks, wheelbarrows and kneeling pads for the weeding.

The weeders and the shearers seemed to get a bit addicted to their tasks - just one more weed, just time to snip a few more blades of grass but all too soon the time to run back was upon us... Had the massive mound of muck been moved, had we dealt with the dung?

YES!!!!

A cracking job from the wheelbarrow team saw the squishy horse apples safely stowed in compost bins. HURRAH! Christina was thrilled!

We headed back down the path and regrouped in Queens Square for a lovely long stretch and chat about forthcoming runs - The Chew Valley 10k, the New Forest 10 (miles!) and the Bristol Half. I'll send out links for all of these runs in my weekly email so that people who were not on the run can also see what we're planning.

TOP WORK TEAM!

Well that was a wet one....

21 wonderful dry people set off from Vivo tonight to run a short distance to a road in Bedminster that needed a little TLC. Some of us were prepared for the weather, some of us were a bit more optimistic and hoped our 'it never rains for GoodGym' mantra would hold true for this run.

Sadly for the optimists, it absolutely deluged on us. We'd have been drier in the river. But because we're tough and b because it was not actually that cold, we stuck to the plan and got on with the run. It didn't take us long to get to the site in Bedminster where we met up with the Patchwork Project and were given gloves, trowels and bags and asked to weed several flower beds. It was important to weed first as we were then planting lots of little seedlings, which in their formative stage look like weeds!

30 minutes seemed to both fly by and go slowly as we got wetter and wetter and wetter, but we actually finished the task with about 5 minutes to spare so we went for a slightly longer run to get back to HQ - and of course it stopped running pretty much the second we stopped gardening. Thanks for nothing, weather gods!

Our run back was uneventful and actually rather lovely as we followed the river and crossed it no less than 4 times to get back to Vivo! At the end we had a few congratulations to dish out - to Ted for making this his 50th run and to Chris L for getting to his grand old 100th run! Top work chaps. Also congratulations to Robyn, Hannah and Emily for coming along for their first time despite the weather - if you can make it in that kind of rain you've got no excuses for the future.