With June feeling more like November only the hardiest of Goodgymers showed up to face the raindrops tonight!

Awarding the Garland of Glory to Sarah for having completed 10 Goodgym Good deeds, and welcoming Isabella to the gang, our all-female dream team, zipped on their capes (rain jackets) and headed out to battle the elements, litter, and graffiti.

Our route took us straight through the city centre to the Oxford Canal, where we met Tim Wiseman, the Oxford City Council Waterways Coordinator. Tim had come prepared with paint, paintbrushes and rollers, and we set straight to work painting over graffiti.

The graffiti on Worcester College's external walls has been there for months, and is a real eyesore on the main route from the railway station to city centre and along the Oxford Canal towpath.

Rollers and paintbrushes a-go-go, it took 6 Goodgymers only half an hour to paint over the three patches of graffiti on Hythe Bridge Street and over the road on Middle Fisher Row. In future we hope to return to plant climber plants to deter more graffiti appearing.

Swapping painty fingers for gloves and bin bags, our next task was a litter pick.

Waving goodbye to Tim, and heading toward the Thames, we made light work of litter along our route. Swooping on plastic bottles, cans, takeaway containers, cigarette packets, and glass bottles we collected up 2 large bin bags of litter from our 1.5 mile run along the Thames Path, ending at Folly Bridge. Plogging (picking up litter while jogging) is pretty satisfying, but it's also extremely frustrating to see so much litter being dropped, often only yards from a bin.

Soaked to the skin by now it felt like high time to make a dash for home, and through Christchurch Meadows was the most direct route back to Cowley. Enjoying our jaunt along the Cherwell, views of Merton and Christchurch, and making kissy faces at the cows in the meadow, we were brought up short by a whole heap of litter on the riverbank. It's end of exam-time in Oxford, and it seems that there are some students who like to party by the river and then leave their booze bottles, tutus, shoes(!), and silly string behind. Feeling sorry for the one man clearing up the mess we stopped briefly to help, before dashing back over Magdalen Bridge and up the Cowley Road. Squelch Squelch Squelch.

• 3 patches of graffiti painted over.
  
• 2 bin bags of rubbish collected.
  
• 1 man helped with the post-exam clear up.
  

Thanks to Sarah for the pun!

Next week it WILL be sunny. That's quite enough rainy runs for 1 summer!

On such a summery evening it felt all wrong to meet inside, so we took our rendez-vous point outside the East Oxford Community Centre and soaked up some early summer sunshine. Chatter about upcoming running plans brought us to talking about Love Trails Festival in Wales in July (looks really fun!) and the Two Tunnels Races and Summer Party which one or two of us Oxford Goodgymers are already signed up for.

Welcoming Guilia, Linden, Sophie, and Talitha to their first Goodgym run (give them a cheer!), we set off on the 1 mile run to Flo's - The Place in the Park through the back streets of Cowley.

Flo's is a great community hub in East Oxford with loads going on even though it is a relatively new addition to the area. For most of us this was our first visit to Flo's - The place in the Park, so our task owner Makena explained a bit about the place; the building was taken over by the community after the Oxford children's centres were closed in 2016, and it opened as a community hub in October 2018. It now houses a nursery, the community midwives, and a cafe, and will shortly be hosting a Refill Shop too.

Flo's is surrounded by metal railings, and our task for the evening was to make these look a bit friendlier and prettier by weaving strands of willow through them.

Checking out some examples of other willow fences in the garden spaces and collecting up our pre-soaked willow branches we channeled our inner artists and got to work. This is the kind of task that would take 1 person a really long time to do, but with 13 motivated Goodgymers you can achieve a surprising amount of willow-weaving in 40 minutes or so! Not wishing to completely block the view into Flo's charming garden space, we decided that 2 lines of willow weaving were the best way to prettify the metal railings. Persuading the tougher willow branches through the railings was a surprisingly good arm workout, and I'd like to think that tiptoeing past wildflowers, fennel, and asparagus spears helped us improve our agility. We may not have achieved something as impressive as this, but give us a couple of weeks to practice and maybe we'll get there!

Incidentally, our previous visit to Flo's has been featured as one of the example photos on the Oxford Green Week photo competition website - we are the example for Health and Happiness.

Once we'd used up all the willow we said our goodbyes, and with all of the lovely Florence Park to play in it would have been criminal not to use the area for our fitness session. Everyone paired up with a certain trepidation for a game of meet & retreat: dashing in opposite directions around our chosen patch of grass, high 5-ing when you meet your partner coming the other way, and then racing back to the starting point. Who can get back to the base first?! This definitely brought out everyone's competitive instinct! As a recovery break it was straight into 30 seconds of partner-planking. Then repeat. Twice.

Good things come in 3s you know...

As most impressive planker Tim was awarded the Garland of Joy to wear on the run back to base, rocking the florals all the way down the Iffley Road (Roger Bannister would be proud).

Same time next week?

With only a short run to our task at St Mary's and St John Churchyard we had time for some more thorough introductions this evening, and what better way to get to know each other than to learn what is everyone's Kryptonite?! With fears both rational and slightly more niche (yes, I'm freaked out by moths, but fine with butterflies) brought out in the open, and promises NEVER to use them against each other, we set off running feeling like we'd had a mini group therapy session.

Half a mile up the Cowley Road we met Ruth, who co-ordinates the volunteers at St Mary & St John churchyard. The churchyard is closed for new burials and is now being managed as a peaceful green wildlife space by community volunteers. Our tasks for the evening were to water a newly-planted hedgerow, weed around the saplings, rake and sweep up cut grass, and clear the cow parsley and sticky willy (that again!) from the Garden of Remembrance to allow the smaller wildflowers to get some light.

16 Goodgymers donned gloves, tooled up and split into teams. Tim is turning into our raking specialist, single-handedly tackling the strimmed back grass, while the cow parsley/sticky willy group got to experience Panto at it's finest as Julia channeled Captain Hook using a sickle as a hand. The promise of 'no nettles this week' proved not to be 100% accurate for the weeders and waterers, but with plenty of dock-leaves around to take the edge off the sting hopefully those tingles won't last long!

40 minutes flew by with radio interviews, several wheelbarrow loads to the compost pile, and innumerable watering cans full of water to drench the plants. Before we knew it we were packing away the tools and heading for the hills. Literally.

up Up UP!

It turns out Divinity Road goes on, and on, and on......BUT, at the top we were rewarded with a GOLDEN POST BOX commemorating Lily van den Broeke's 2012 Paralympic Gold medal. Heading along to Warneford Meadow gave us the opportunity to talk a little about the work on mental health undertaken at the Warneford Hospital, where our very own Goodgymer Jessica works, and where we have a task coming up in a couple of weeks' time.

Then on to South Park, past the TOAD distillery, but no time for gin this week - we had railings to admire! Our very first task in Oxford was clearing the railings of ivy at the top of South Park on Cheney Lane, so we were pleased to see that they're still looking ivy free. Into the park, and the pay off for climbing up the hill, DOWN!

Swooping through the park with one of the best views of Oxford's Dreaming Spires, we stopped only to admire the tight-rope walkers and for a brief round of freeze-frisbee, then back to base.

• Congratulations this week to Tim for completing his 10th Goodgym Good Deed. Give him a cheer!

• A big welcome, to Josie, Sarah, Alya and Lucy. We hope to see you again soon!

• AND....thank you to Katie for the Run Report title. I always appreciate help with the punning!