It was great to have so many people join us for the first time tonight: welcome to Jenny, Oliver, Mitch, Richard, Jo and Isabel! We got warmed up, marvelled at the fact that 11% of the runners here tonight were called Richard, then split up into our respective groups.

Mel led a walk and chat litter-picking group on a couple of kilometre tour around the local area. It was a well-planned route as, even though right in the centre of town, the group found loads of rubbish and hauled a load of bags to a pick-up point for Bristol Waste. Despite being busy litter-bees, they still had time to take some power stance litter-picking photos. All in a night's work!

The Black Arrows

Meanwhile, the rest of us set off towards St Werburghs, led by our very own acrobatic running crew, The Black Arrows, who stunned us with performances of running in squares, arrows and straight lines. The talent really never ends here at GoodGym Bristol. We soon arrived at our two neighbouring tasks for the evening, St Werburgh's City Farm Community Garden and Narroways. The charities had even had a chinwag before we arrived to work out how many of us each of them needed!

The Tree Musketeers

Seven GoodGymers headed off with Chris from Narroways to the nature reserve to do some cutting back of the overgrown areas. This involved lots of bramble cutting, hacking at long grass and weeds (which Richard got scarily into), cutting back overgrown trees and bushes and trying to remove ash saplings. Chris offered a prize for anyone who could do this (I embarrassed myself having a go and not moving it in the slightest) - top tip, remove your saplings when they are tiny!

Meanwhile the rest of the group were split into seven teams in the Community Gardens. Half of the teams were allocated an area of the gardens to tackle the bindweed which has spread across the whole area during the hot summer. The other teams were set to work to remove a tree which had fallen onto the path, stopping it from being accessible and doing compost heap runs. Liam had a blissful half hour peacefully watering the vegetables and Chris and Richard got the hard job with turning compost at the farm.

Living on barrow-ed time

The time went too quickly and we had to drag people away from their bindweed to run home. The team from the gardens were really pleased what our 'team of locusts' had got done, and we wished them farewell for the last of our light evenings at the gardens this year.

We headed back and did a lunge stop. After 5 minutes and legs beginning to burn, we got the group back together and headed back to Queen Square for a much-needed stretch off.

Good Cheer

Welcome to Joseph and Mark who joined us for the first time tonight. It was also great to celebrate not one but two GoodGym birthdays: 🎉HAPPY BIRTHDAY MATT AND LAURA!🎉

A puzzling task

Alice D did a wonderful job leading a group to Emmaus on her inaugural run leading evening. At Emmaus, the group met Xanne who explained their tasks for the evening and set them to work around the warehouse. The group got to work sorting donations to find the weirdest items and figuring out puzzles, including puzzling their way through subbuteo (thank goodness, or else what would the pun title have been).

Meanwhile, the rest of the group headed to Cherry Tree Garden. Julia set us to work on cutting back the overgrown areas, pruning a tree back to life and weeding the flower areas. The group split into half so while half of the group channeled their inner-Charlie Dimmocks, the rest of the group went to Victoria Park to do hill reps. We swapped over halfway through and the overall conclusion was that the group definitely prefer gardening to hills. After half an hour, the area was looking remarkably better and we had filled 5 garden waste bags.

A little pick-me-up

We finished the night with a team relay including a carrying-your-teammate round, with tactics ranging from piggy-backs to queen's chairs. Georgia's team raced home and were crowned victorious.

We headed off to celebrate with Laura and Matt and a double dose of chocolate cake, as well as celebrate Jenny's Bristol-cake win from the weekend and Darren's belated cheese-chasing medal!

It was a bumper night of GoodGym tonight in Bristol with 50 runners and 8 people joining us for the first time: welcome Patricia, Ailish, Joe, Kate, Jonny, Thomas, Lucy and Cavid!

Skipping prison

We quickly split into our two groups for the evening. Alice W was taking a group to The Island, an arts and events charity, on a 2km round trip. When they arrived, they were set to work with filling the skip that they had hired specially for GoodGym's arrival with all sorts of no-longer usable chairs and tables. The team worked in super-fast time and soon the skip was filled. Tom then gave them a tour of the space to give them a bit more of an idea of the work they do. This included a trip to the underground cells and an arts space which was so 'arty' that it inspired the group to do a Mannequin Challenge in it... Spot the blinkers.

Meanwhile the rest of the group headed on a 7km run to help LitterArti in Easton. They paint pillars in an underpass which has a skatepark in it. This is used regularly by local people and children, but the council do not keep it litter-free. Therefore, it is down to volunteers to do this. The group of 33 armed themselves with litter-pickers, bin bags, recycling bags and gloves and got to work. They spread over the area and, with the help of a couple of the skate-park users, teamed together to gather 24 bags of rubbish and recycling, as well as several sofas, a mattress and more. There was an incredible difference in the 20 minutes the team worked, so much so that the skaters gave them a round of applause when we headed off for our run home.

On our return we had a game of Runner, Runner, the GoodGym version of British Bulldogs to get rid of any leftover energy, then got excited for this weekend's South West Summer Party hearing the line-up from Matt. It's not to be missed!

While the Balloon Fiesta was cancelled due to the weather, 11 hardy GoodGymers met in the high winds and crazy rain showers this morning to run to do good. We jealously waved goodbye to Chris in the warm and dry ordering his porridge and started our long straight line run up to Bishopsworth to help Creative Workspace.

Having conquered easily conquered the hill and the rain even easing off a little, 5.5km later we arrived at the community centre where it was happy chaos for their Family Fun Day. After clambering over some small people to retrieve our equipment, we set to work in the woodland area.

Blown away

This space used to be incredibly overgrown and has therefore was covered in lots of tiny bits of litter and broken glass. As it is a space for children to play, the charity wanted it cleared of this to make it safe. We scoured the area then set to work weeding the surrounding tarmac and taking the nettles out of the green space. Vale hammered their bunting back into place so it was looking glorious once more.

Forty minutes later we had 4 full bin bags of litter and weeds. With amazing smells wafting from the Creative Workspace cafe it was hard to tear ourselves away, but we took a break for it in another slightly-less-rainy patch and headed on our more-downhill-than-uphill-but-still-actually-quite-a-lot-of-uphill route back.

Vale told us that she used to think that people running in the rain were crazy and now she has turned into one of them. We returned to Mud Dock very soggy and got even more soaked while doing our stretches, but wallowed in the fact that we could now enjoy the warm and dry even more.

Between the rain storms of this afternoon, we gathered for another session of doing good. It was great to have Jamie and Jade join us for the first time tonight and get stuck in with the tasks. And a big shout out to Danica and Paul who jogged with ease despite being 2 days post-marathon!

After getting warmed up, we headed to Felix Road Adventure Playground. They are currently hosting 200-300 children every day for the summer holidays so the team and the playground needed an injection of GoodGym enthusiasm to give them a boost.

Under lock and key

Once we distributed the tools which the team had left for us, we soon we realised we needed more to tackle the mounds of brambles and bushes surrounding the Under-5s Play Area. We knew there was a pile of said tools in the shed, the only problem was finding the key... Queue Mel doing a grand detective job of trying key after key in the shed lock...

Hand weeding, the latest trend

The team were not deterred. After a quick shelter in the playhouse from a particularly heavy shower storm, the gardening teams got to work hand-weeding (we've decided it's a thing) and pulling out the overgrown areas. With the addition of 6 pairs of tools, the two gardening groups weeded all of the pathway and cut back a big section of the play area.

Meanwhile, Mel continued to try different keys...

The rest of the team split into three groups. We had our classic litter-pickers, who filled 3 bags of rubbish from around the playground due to the busy summer days. The staple-removers continued the all-important (and divisive) task of preparing the walls for painting. They continued to add to our now in-depth knowledge of just what equipment works for getting rid of those pesky bits of metal (staple-removers are the worst, so you know). Finally, we had a team on sweeping all of the patio and football pitch areas, topped off by a brush-removal of a football from the top of the net - impressive stuff.

Mel was still trying keys as we called time-up and, not one to be defeated, has promised that next time there will be a sub-group that is on key organising.

We ran back, found out that Richard B is the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow and sent a group of hungry runners to Three Brothers for this month's GoodGym Eats - thank you for organising Danica!

The forecast rain scared off our crowd tonight so we were left with a hardcore 29 to get tonight's tasks done. It was great to welcome Dean, Lill and Louise to GoodGym Bristol tonight and we hope to see you again soon!

It was a long-awaited evening as Russ got his 50th Good Deed after keeping us on tenterhooks for the past few weeks. Yesss Russ!

Berry Weedy

Maria led half of the group off to the Berry Maze for the peak weeding week of the year. Although we were skeptical that such a thing existed, the group arrived to weeds covering all of the maze's pathways. They set to work weeding away, with some breaks to taste the yellow raspberries which were popping up and made a good dent in the weeds. We are returning there for Saturday morning's Community Mission so sign up to get involved!

Cat-egorically a great match

Meanwhile, Alice was embarking on her new love quest with a Dusty Springfield the cat at Zion Community Centre. As Alice considered the potential of taking a new pet home, the rest of the group were split into teams of three to prepare the Community Centre for their first official wedding ceremony on Saturday. The group weeded all around the centre, dusted the toilets, cleaned the chairs, the windows and the pirate ship and generally got the place looking spick and span for the weekend. Once the evening's jobs were complete, we downed some custard creams, staged our very own wedding photo (what do you mean it looks nothing like a wedding?) and prepared for the big event of the night: our time trials for the GoodGym Olympics 1km Race

The Nationwide Race - Bristol leg

The competition was high, the hill was steep and biscuits were the fuel. The group set off from the Co-op (where all the classiest races start) and time-trialled their way down the hill while the rest of us acted as their cheer squad. Absolutely storming performances all round (special thanks to Pendulum for adding to Chris's performance). There is still time to take part! Read all the deets here. Following this excitement, we went at a much more leisurely pace back to Workout where we feasted on Russ' celebratory baklava and mulled over whether Alice and Dusty would ever meet again.