WE HAVE A NEW CENTURION!

Huge applause and praise please for the brilliant Charlotte on her 100th Good Deed. Charlotte has come a long way from someone who felt too shy and anxious to come along to her first ever GoodGym Group Run to now being a face at GoodGym Newcastle that everyone knows. She has never let anything stand in her way and is a key part of our Task Force, helping to organise tasks and manage huge parts of our social media to help to spread the word. Charlotte often volunteers herself as back marker and walk leader, and you can find out why that's so important to her in this story and this one too !

As you will have spotted already we had a massive turn out tonight thanks to a team visit from Newcastle Northern Angels, the Newcastle University Cheerleading team! The team were absolutely full of energy and enthusiasm and it was great to have them along on such a chilly night in toon. We had a catch up from the weekend and a long head count before sending Rachael and Katie off on the walk. To get everyone moving we played rock-paper-scissors-run-squat to warm up before we set off.

We were back at Newcastle Eagles Community Arena tonight where we have been helping to transform the gardens with monthly visits to clear and weed the area around the main car park. This visit saves the Eagles charity close to £1000 as well as the time of many other volunteers who lend a hand and it's always a great physical task that we love to get stuck into. Neil our super-organised task owner was ready for action as always with tools and hi-vis for everyone.

Now as we were such a huge group tonight we had to split in half with a group weeding while the others did the fitness session before a swap over. There were games, drills and burpees to keep as warm as we could at all times. We haven't split a task like this before and it seemed to work really well with the time absolutely flying over and everyone managing to work at top speeds while having fun. Neil was really pleased with what we got done and there was time for him to say a big group thank you to everyone before we ran back out into the night!

No community missions this weekend but there were two completely brilliant Newcastle Parks Community missions over the weekend with some fab autumnal photos. If you haven't seen the reports yet you can find them here: Saturday's is here and Sunday's is here Well done to all who led and got involved. We continue our community missions into the end of the year so if you haven't done one yet, check out the listings and get signed up.

Have a great week knowing you started it the best way doing good things.

Anji x

Attendance record smashed Amazing evening alert Record amount of photos uploaded

52 people for the Massive Mash Up at Newcastle University and it was kind of a big deal

I got home and immediately needed a lie down following this, our most massive group run to date and a smashed attendance record for Newcastle. I knew this one would be huge, but THIS huge? This massive mash up was the brains and beauty of GoodGymer Maggie (thank you!) who is Newcastle University Students Union officer for sport as well as a popular member of our group.

It was one of those evenings where people just kept arriving and it was great that it was all caught on camera by Katy and Matt from Sharp Life who were joining us to film a piece on GoodGym Newcastle. A quick welcome, a short warm up and round up of the weekend's achievements including hearing from Emily who was part of GoodGym York's Sean's amazing marathon yesterday. His story is here if you need any more inspiration tonight. It felt brilliant to run right through the city centre in such a huge group with so many people around in Northumberland Street seeing a see of red charging past them! Carol Anne thought we should have had some army-esque chant going as we went and it did cross my mind that having an entire cheerleading squad with us tonight should have meant we were prepared for such activity on the way.

GIVE ME A G! G! GIVE ME AN O! O! and so on...

We were met at the University Students Union building by Maggie and Phil and given a brief intro to the tasks that had been arranged for us which were:

• Clearing the storage space where the NEST group store goodies for the refugee community in Newcastle
• Making Wiggly Bags for and writing letters to poorly children in the RVI
• Painting a blackboard and cleaning out jars for the society that supports the Newcastle Food Bank
• Making bird feeders to hang in the trees around campus

Everyone thought they had the best task tonight but I think the wiggly bag group had the edge in that they had music and sweets, although the NEST group did have toys to play with, the bird feeder people got to take spare feeders home and the food bank group got to get clarty (that's Geordie for messy) so I think everyone was a winner. I heard one of the university students passing through and commenting that we were the "Happiest People Ever" so I think the fun we have doing good things was shining out of us tonight. Our commitment showed as Evan turned up a record 40 minutes late having had the journey from hell (and a pint on the way in the students union) kudos Evan

Such a great mix of tasks and everything was smashed within our task timing of just 45 minutes. All of the society leaders were delighted with the impact we were able to make in such a short space of time. The NEST group were all given thank you letters which was such a lovely touch too, and everyone felt really appreciated.

The university campus was a brilliant space for our fitness session: paired running and short-burst exercises in which everyone got sweaty, out of breath and will probably have epic Tuesday Legs from partaking in. We will definitely use the space again, don't think I didn't see those steps, they'll come in handy!

I've already had some fab feedback from some of you this evening so hopefully everyone enjoyed it as much as I did. We will be back at the University again hopefully a few times before the end of the year so watch this space, it's definitely one not to miss! Hopefully you will be along next week for our visit to a new Changing Lives project and more people doing good and getting fit, just maybe with less sweets. Sign up here for our visit to Gifford House.

Happy running! Anji