Yesterday saw the return of the annual Manchester 24 Hour Run Against Homelessness. 🏃‍♀️

Between us, we completed a total of 17 laps and 85 km (not including run commutes!). 🎉

Hannah and Simone kicked things off with a walking lap to check out the route. 😍

Over the course of the evening, Hannah, Ben, Laura and Mai then volunteered as run leaders for specific laps – some of us taking on speedy 27.5 minute pacing and others demonstrating the important role of tail runner! 😊

A big shout out to Simone who stayed for the entire evening and cheered us on whilst soaking up the atmosphere! ❤️

It was great to bump into long-lost Goodgymer Pete and have a catch-up! 🏃

8pm was our scheduled GoodGym slot and we chatted our way round the course, completing the second and third laps for some and drawing our evening to a close. 🏃‍♂️

Ben continued with a couple of volunteer run leader slots before returning with Juno 🐶 in the morning to complete a further 3 laps – taking his total to 7! 🙌

Tonight's run was the second week of doubling up our good deed tasks!

This week we were delivering leaflets for The Kindling Community Food Hub to advertise their upcoming harvest activities and also dropping of The Post Newspaper to the Offerton community.

This week we were armed with head torches for the darker nights and filled our rucksacks to the brim with leaflets and papers and headed off on foot to our delivery destination.

While on route, we took the opportunity to get those extra steps in and swing by one of our recent tasks, the stunning La Bocca to La Stocka mural.

Its always nice to see the finished product or a project and what the community can achieve!

Happy Run day Tuesday!

A few months ago, GoodGym Stockport got involved with a weekend takeover by Sophie and John, of the Grit Studios, to transform an area of central Stockport and add colour and foliage to the unkempt looking streets.

After a huge success, the folk at Grit Studios are at it again, bringing colour and the community together in an incredible project 'La Boca to La Stocka'.

La Boca to La Stocka aims to create a creative corridor through Stockport and have enlisted 5 artists who painted the Boca region of Buenos Aires to come over to Stockport to help to transform a large area of Hopes Carr in central Stockport.

Our task was to help to prep the wall ready for the painting takeover.

We took a steady 3km run to the wall site, we dipped, we rollered and we stretched to paint the giant area.

GoodGymmers galore at the special Sweden Day extra parkrun at Billdalsparken, volunteering and spreading the word about GoodGym. Four of us had met the previous day in another country - the tiny Nibe parkrun in Denmark for their Constitution Day special parkrun - 4 GGers out of a field of 28!

A quick photocall saw more GoodGymmers (without proof by way of T-shirt membership) appear. Some were lapsed members, some very current and all delighted to make new GoodGym/parkrun buddies.

Melanie was parkwalking, Lucy was on post-event close down and everyone else was helping people in a lovely GoodGym/parkrun way.

The event usually gets 20 or ao parkrunners and they'd been planning for weeks to enable the success of the event, expecting ten times that number. In the end, 218 tokens were given out, 217 of them were returned and the missing 136 isn't expected to be needed for another year!

There were parkrun shaped cookies (any ideas where we can get a GG cookie cutter?) and the longest café queue of any parkrun yet, some 35 minutes and therefore longer than many had spent on the course.

My own official time at 43:01 is nearly ten minutes faster than my actual time but I'm used to that as someone who's towards the back of the field. Vaguely Northern Darren, as ever, ran back to me once he'd finished and walked in with us, taking photos of all the chalk markings the team had made to identify the course and give encouragement - "Free Bird Song", "You have the good form" and "Go parkrunners" which we think was encouragement rather than telling us we should leave!

At the post-parkrun coffee and waffle (the foodstuff and the conversation) VND and I were chatting to the "Medical Support" volunteer (a child psychiatrist named Emily who was grateful only a couple of plasters were needed) introduced us to the Swedish phrase equivalent to "it's the tight level of busy - not too much, not too little" which encapsulates the Swedish take on life - not always striving for excellence but being enough - if it's lagom, it's lagom.

See you all again next year, same time, slightly different place? You're very welcome in Bristol in the mean time.

Another delivery task for the fabulous folk at the Heaton's Post. This time, our run took us out to the community of Reddish to deliver a hefty batch of papers to the residents.

We set off on a mile sunny run there with our rucksacks weighted for maximum impact. We chatted our way round the route, delivering the Heaton's news as we went.

Even the local cats wanted a piece of the action!

With the load lighter, we returned to base, a little hotter and having worked up a decent sweat for the day!

Last night was the start of GoodGym Stockport's festive tasks amd saw 8 GoodGymers arrive on foot, wheels or ... sleighs to our local Care4Calais warehouse.

We arrived to find the warehouse packed to the rafters with toys, games and merriment, all ready to be wrapped and taken to children across the city.

Like a production line of GoodGym elves, we happily wrapped and stuck and labelled, while discussing the best way to wrap a football!! There's a technique if you didn't know!!

After a solid 45 minutes, all the presents were wrapped and ready to go and await the gleeful faces of those unwrapping them!

A wonderful task, and we're ready for round two next week!