36 incredible people joined me in Camden, helped Scope in their charity shop, ran over 6km, walked and celebrated TEN years of GoodGym!

Well what an evening that was! We returned to our usual home at the St Pancras & Somers Town Living Centre, we celebrated Kat and Rosie turning three, Rosie hitting 100 good deeds AND GoodGym's 10th birthday... AND we introduced everyone to Ben Hansen-Hicks the shiny new Camden trainer... and breathe!

As part of the #GG10 celebrations we had our lovely GoodGym flag with us and because we just do things better in Camden we had some shiny gold balloons to join our run for both Rosie's 100 and of course the 10th birthday. We also had copies of the wonderful Fit Together the book produced by GoodGym with stories from the first ten years.

After a huge intro with all of the above fitted in and news on #SuperSaturday (A day full of missions for every area this Saturday) and of course the health and safety and info on the task we headed on out and got warmed up!

On a celebratory night like this it was great to have everyone together and whilst it is always hard to manage we all safely walked and ran to the Scope charity shop. Once there Helen had us all queued up and divvied out roles. Tasks tonight:

• Donation collections outside
• Mannequin dressing
• Various cleaning work
• Shoe sorting
• Trouser measuring
• Clothes tagging
• and a whole lot more...

Half an hour of hard work later we were all piling out and getting ready for the next stage of the evening. With our flag with us, ably looked after by Ben, we headed off to various locations to get some fantastic photos for the GG10 celebrations.

• Camden Road Bridge
• Gasholders at King's Cross
• Francis Crick Institute
• Somers Town Coffeehouse

Thanks to George, Liuba, Ben and Steve for co-ordination and direction and phone-lending for all the photos.

Finally we stretched and then we headed to the pub to celebrate with cakes made by Liz and Rosie, some prosecco from the pub and party poppers from Sophie!

All in all a wonderful night of celebration with TEN and ONE HUNDRED being the key numbers!

Cheers,
Pritesh

Refreshed from a bank holiday a massive group of ravishing runners met at Vivo to help tidy up Spring Hill with Incredible Edible and the yard at Emmaus.

20 runners came with me (Gary) to Emmaus. We ran around a mile to get there before being greeted by the ever smiling Xanne. She gave us an introduction and explained that our task would be a little different from the usual. Today we were to sort through all of the donated items that were put into the yard as they were deemed trashier than a romantic airport novel cover being read aloud by Oscar the Grouch. We were put to work smashing furniture, tearing fabric from mattresses, smashing electrical equipment to separate the plastic and metal parts and tool sorting.

New runners Roanna and Guido worked alongside veteran and recent conqueror of the Matahorn Ultra Madahorn Matt to sort a plethora of tools. While the electronics team had a smashing time a really swept the floor with their dance routines. But biggest shout goes out to the team taking on the task of removing the fabric from a mattress that had every spring individually wrapped. Needless to say they did not quite have enough time but we will be back to finish the job.

After finishing up and leaving Xanne happy with our work we ran back to Queen Square for a game of Chicken Otter Badger before stretching out.

On root to snow berry who's boss

The remaining 10 runners joined Hannah of Incredible Edible to mercilessly destroy the (superficially appealing) snowberries that were taking up valuable edible space that could be used for planting tasty food.

The 10 surely did the work of 20 and after haf an hour snowberry remains littered the path. Special kudos to Sophie who managed to break off one of the prongs on her fork in her enthusiasm and to the Godfather who totally laid waste to a particularly tough snowberry root.

Farewell from Goodgym Bristol to Louis who is heading home after finishing his job in Bristol. Hope to see you on the Birmingham run report soon, Louis!

Thanks for a great evening guys. It was hot and humid but you smashed it putting the jobs to bed no problem a-tool. Snow runder our task hosts reallly dig what we do and root for us all the way!

See you next time!

Tuesday come good deeds be done, by loads of runners and then more some! This evening 30 runners came to help us take on unscheduled tasks litter picking and delivering flyers for Helpful Peeps in Lawrence Hill. Welcome back to all those faces we've seen before and a a massive hello to new runner Anna.

Our task to help Incredible Edible this evening was cancelled due to our host Hannah being ill (get well soon smiley lady!) so we put our legs and hands to good use helping elsewhere in the city. After meeting up at Vivo and warming up we split into two groups, one to litter pick around the Lawrence Hill roundabout and the other to deliver flyers for helpful peeps just down the road.

I led the litter lot followed Clo Slee by my reliable back marker. Paul led the leafleteers with excellent back marking from Alex. On arrival at the roundabout it was obvious to my group that we had arrived not a minute too soon. The whole place was litter-ally strewn with rubbish, so it was time to stop the trash talking and start picking our battles. The whole group went right to work grab and bagged as much as they could to brighten the area up. There were more Baggins than you would find in Bilbo's family tree. The best find of the day was most certainly a mug with a princess cat on it. Truly a treasure to behold. After around 30 minutes on the task we had filled 21 bags of rubbish. Not bad for an evenings work at all.

Meanwhile team flyer were going the distance to post as many leaflets for Helpful Peeps as they can. Promoting the great work their website does to promote a community where people share their time, skills and knowledge to help each other for free. They covered a large area and hopefully drummed up lots more support for such a giving community.

On the way back my group had a couple of relay races in Castle Park and Queen Square including a game of "Don't squat 'til you you get enough". My favourite moments being Lindsey's celebratory scaling of the steps despite running a longer route than required for her lap, and the strong performance by Liam and his team to win both races. As we were finishing up the other group arrived and put in lap of the square with a sprint leg. We then congregated for a stretch and sign off.

Thanks to everyone who came along, we really made a big difference tonight by cleaning up so much trash and hopefully uniting random strangers to help each other.

See you lot again soon!

As Yazz once said "the only way is up" and that was certainly the case tonight. 22 spring legged runners met to tackle the hills of Redland to deliver leaflets for Above and Beyond promoting their Christmas parties and Bristol to Paris Bike ride.

We met at Vivo and warmed up with some leg spinning and introductions before breaking into two groups with Dave and Alice leading the front and myself and Clo the rear. Jacob Wells Road provided the main challenge with it's slow curving gradient rising like a genetically manipulated cobra uncoiling upwards to protect itself from the immanent danger of a oncoming gigantic mongoose wading through across the river towards it.

We reached the Godfather's car that was parked nearby and picked up the leaflets we were to deliver. These were distributed between the runners and then we took our two teams of 12 to separate parts of the area, Team Godfather to the West and Team Gazebo to the East. As if the hills were not enough most of the house in the area had steep steps too so the climbing just kept on coming. But this did not deter our hardy runners in red and they stepped up to the challenge and they certainly delivered a fantastic performance as every single leaflet was posted with time to spare.

They way back to Vivo was a breeze as it was all downhill. We met up in Queen Square where Dave's group arrived a little earlier so performed 3 types of lunge before my group came to meet them and stretch out.

Thanks for coming along everyone, I think that must have been a record for the number of leaflets delivered in on GoodGym but not having counted them we have no idea, but as we said let's just say it was one more than our last record hey.

See y'all again soon.

The joint was absolutely hopping tonight as 33 wise guys showed up for our third card bed workshop. A very warm welcome to our new runners Nick, Ben, Hannah, Roly and Ed, and special mention to our visitor Kerry from Ealing.

After a quick but rather choreographical warm up which 'somehow' ended up in a New York, New York kick line, we headed off to our destination, the United Reformed Church off West Street, Bedminster who have once again kindly allowed us to use the church hall for the workshop.

On arrival, we got all the discarded bike boxes out of a strategically parked car and met up with Elliot who showed us how best to cut and fold them into the template shapes he has designed. When assembled together, the pieces form a rigid cardboard bed that can be used by a homeless person to sleep away from a cold and hard concrete floor. The beds that we made tonight will be delivered to a local project Help Bristol's Homeless who will distribute them at their soup kitchens. Each bed comes packed in a plastic sheet which keeps the card dry and a printed set of flat-pack style instructions for putting everything together.

At times things were a little hectic as teams of 5 or 6 manned the available tables and tried to co-ordinate drawing and cutting in such a way that no one cut anything that was likely to bleed. However, after ten minutes or so everyone seemed to find their place and a production line of bed templates was in full flow. All the while, our expert clean up team packed up the discarded bits of card - and dressed one of their members in a cardboard suit of armour.

Half an hour later and Elliot was able to demonstrate an assembled bed with Cristian taking on the important role of chief tester. In all we finished another three complete beds.

While one group headed back to base for some fitness games the second helped to pack the completed items back in the car and then ran back too.

Congratulations Dave and Emma!

It just remained for us to congratulate our newest milestone recipients. Emma (aka Comet) who has reached a fantastic 50 and Dave (aka Godfather aka Dasher) who has reached an incredible 300. Well done both of you, GG Bristol absolutely wouldn't be half the place it is without your happy smiling faces, energy and enthusiasm.

Finally, back at the Vivo bar, Emma laid on a full party tea (including pink wafers) and Cristian led us in a perfectly pronounced chorus of Felicidades to Emma who is also celebrating her birthday tomorrow.