It was a very rainy Shrove Tuesday tonight. While the people of Bristol sat in traffic jams to get home to their cosy pancakes, we donned our waterproofs and got ready to run.

We were helping two tasks tonight: Group 1 set off to help Emmaus and Group 2 to help Up Our Street.

Emmaus had just got a big delivery of donations from another charity shop which was closing down. They therefore had a choc-a-block warehouse which needed sorting. Many bodies squeezed between each other and all of the donated goods to get as much sorting as possible to organise the warehouse going forward.

The second group (after having a long press-up, chair hold and squat stint on the way) were met by Khalil from Up Our Street who manages the Lawrence Hill area. He armed us with litter pickers, hi-viz and bags and the group split into teams of 4 to tackle each of the allocated streets in the 30 minute time frame. The group had soon cleared the streets and gathered over 8 bags of litter to be collected by Bristol Waste. Khalil was delighted with our efforts and has already asked for us to come back and help again.

The two groups ran back to base in the increasing rain and gathered for the second most important activity of the night (good deeds always come first, obviously): the Pancake Race 🥞. Each team was equipped with a frying pan and a pancake and instructed to sprint and flip until their whole team had successfully ran. Some questionable flips, some very muddy dropped pancakes and some downright mush later, I think we can truthfully say that we should probably stick to the running...

We rounded off the evening with an alternative circular, beige snack with our monthly GoodGym Eats to Franco Manca, where we warmed up stuffing ourselves with hot sourdough - delicious!