It was a Bumper Birthday Night: massive happy birthday to Claire who celebrated with us (and a whole load of chocolate cake) tonight and to Kerry who had her birthday on Sunday. 🎂🎈🎉

It was great to have Stephen join us for the first time - welcome Stephen! And lovely to see Nick back from his 6 month stint in Canada, welcome back to the rain Nick! Alex and Richard also joined us an impressive 3 days after completing the Green Man Ultra - ouch! Great to see you both.

We had two tasks tonight to help with tonight. Maria led a group to Clifton to do leafleting for her orchestra who are doing a fundraising concert for the Bristol Drugs Project. The team did a great job of climbing Park Street, distributing the several hundred leaflets and working on their orchestra impressions/ invisible instrument playing.

Meanwhile, the rest of the gang headed to Faithspace where we were met by Suzanne and Marky. Marky set a small group to work with some gardening tasks in the green space opposite the community centre. The rest of the group helped Suzanne by distributing 200 leaflets about upcoming community centre events around the local area, prompting a game of Who Can Find A Letterbox - surprisingly challenging in Redcliffe!

We finished off with some biscuits, juice and a bit of core, then headed back to Queen Square with a stop for arm-circling-relays and finished off with tabata lunges and squats - you might feel them tomorrow.

I don't Claire what you say, there is no such thing as too much cake

After all of that, we headed in for birthday celebrations with not one, not two, but three types of cake. OOFT.

*Pun credit to Darren and obviously not me who it needed explaining to

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 great to have Simon, Martha, Miriam and Maria join us for the first time tonight! We treated them with a game of Whoosh to get warmed up (I promise our warm-ups are not normally that mentally challenging) then split into our two groups.

A bunch of us headed off, navigating our way through the Extinction Rebellion protest, to St Werburgh's City Farm Gardens. We met Sarah and Emily who had a whole host of tasks for us to get stuck into. We split into groups and swarmed off around the gardens, weeding all of the paths, cutting back overgrown bushes and trees, removing bindweed from the grounds, watering plants and turning compost. In just 30 minutes, the group did an amazing job of getting all of this manual work done - apparently the compost alone would have taken the team two weeks!

While our trusty clan of barrow-returners went off to the farm, the rest of the group were lucky enough to have a Lunge Off in their two teams. Who knew there was quite such a height difference in the group until this challenge?!

A marrow-thon effort

Meanwhile, Maria led a group up the steep hill to Bramble Hill Farm. They were met by Kim and Adi, our youngest GoodGym helper. They all set to work with various tasks around the farm. This was mainly taking photos of the pigs, but also included lots of weeding, watering of the veg, collecting eggs from the chicken, post-bashing and bindweed removal. Their hard work was rewarded by getting to pick and take home some massive courgettes. Queue the marrow puns...

A marrow escape

They finished all of this just in time to pull themselves away from the hilltop view of a hot air balloon-filled dusky Bristol and make a run for it down the hill, newly equipped with some summer squash. After cooling off and discussing Darren's rocker days over Ross's delicious birthday macaroons (thanks Ross!), the only other key subject on the cards was this week's menu because...

Tomarrow's dinner is courgette to be decided

No pun credit is taken by the author: thank you to Gary, Mel, Clem and Richard.

It was great to have Jess and Joanne join us tonight for their first group runs - welcome and we look forward to seeing you back soon! We were also delighted to be joined by Klara tonight, who is going to be the wonderful new Trainer of Exeter when it launches on 20th August. She put the group through their paces as Trainer of Bristol tonight to get ready for the big day...

Happy Campers

After Klara getting us warmed-up, we split into two groups. Alice returned to her land legs after her weekend smashing the Swoosh and led half the group to Emmaus to get stuck in with a cush(ion)y task. This involved the group arranging all of the sofas in the warehouse into perfect formation (and then having a lie down for all of their hard work). The rest of the team were on tent duty. They erected all of the tents to ensure they were in good condition then took them back down and packed them neatly away to be sold. Alice gave the team the 5 minute challenge to take a four-person tent down in. Who knew Tuesday nights were full of so much skills training?

Here we go round the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush, the mulberry bush

Which is what the rest of us did once we had met Laura from Bedminster Patchwork. This community group own patches of green space around the area which they manage. The Myrtle Street Orchard is now not open to the public but the local school looks onto it. It has become overgrown in the hot weather, so we armed ourselves with gloves and tools and went round and round the mulberry bush but did it while hacking, chopping and pulling out as much as we could to bring the orchard back to life. All the while avoiding the wasps and ants nest which we had brought to the surface in this wildlife haven and - for a couple of our poor more allergic GoodGymers - avoiding the grass completely by sticking to some litter and fruit picking (separately, don't worry).

That was mint

After getting some goodie bags of mint and fruit to take back home with us, we headed back to Queen Square for Klara to put us through our paces with some circuit training. Exeter GoodGymers are definitely going to become a fit bunch! After all of that, we were ready for a well-earned sit-down and drink, as we waved Klara goodbye and good luck for next month.

Thanks to Matt, Tim and Julie for the puns!