There was a certain tension in the air tonight as a high knee-off between lefts and rights looked like it could descend into a rather unsavoury fitness duel. Hopefully the rights will keep their rather boastful comments to themselves next week or it really looks like the lefts could (heel) kick off.

Still, things calmed down eventually and as the dust settled an astounding 33 runners came into view. That's 33 amazing people who are happy to give up their Tuesday evening and run through the cold and dark to help sort the stock at their local food bank. Gert proud of all of you!

Our run tonight took us past the broken Cheesegrater bridge, (closed for six months after a lorry drove onto it!) and out to Big Yellow storage where the East Bristol food bank stores its stock and where we were met by Andy.

After enjoying the challenge of testing the quoted capacity of a 26 person lift, we arrived at floor 3 to find that Andy had been busy. A neat line of crates lay waiting for us all labelled up with the particular food type they should contain - there was even a "Christmas things" crate - how exciting is that! In fact, with our huge turnout tonight we dispatched a small team to lay out a second line of crates, thus doubling our sorting rate.

The sort process is simple, crates containing a random array of items are removed from the store cupboard one at a time, weighed and then their contents are sorted into categories using other empty crates so they can be dispatched to the various food banks around the city for distribution. Ciara manned the scales and did an amazing job of efficiently recording the weights so they could be quickly carried around for sorting.

A steady stream of Goodgym red passed into and out of the store cupboard and I was pleased to observe some excellent crate lifting form after our practice at the warm-up.

By the end of our timeslot we had succeeded in sorting ALL the crates - brilliant work everyone! We said goodbye to Andy (who looked really pleased with our progress) and ran back to base, with my group taking in a few sets of steps along the way.

Thank you to Mel for leading the second group today and Richard and Dave for backmarking. Thanks also to Richard for the pun!

And lastly special mention to Matt for ensuring that every one of his crates was captured on film.

Bed up? Well, let me tell you a story ...

One damp night in November, a massive number of Goodgymmers assembled for a brilliant task at the brand new Bristol YMCA (thanks Emma for sending me this one!)

After a highly unconventional follow-my-leader warm-up around Queen Square the group headed off on a short run to the old Police station where the hostel was to be situated. The hostel is to combine both conventional accommodation and a number of beds for young people who have become homeless with one providing financial support for the other.

The builders were due to finish in a week or so all that remained was to move a trifling 99 flat packed bunk beds from the ground floor into the various dormitories ready to be assembled. After a quick intro from our host Ben, mattresses and bed frames quickly starting disappearing from their respective piles as an eager army of red GG worker ants busily ferried them up two floors and distributed them amongst the rooms.

This was fairly physical work as the frames were pretty heavy so it was all the more impressive to have completely cleared the ground floor area after 40 minutes on the task.

Of course, now all that remains is the the trifling matter of assembling 99 beds -so do join us on Saturday for part two if you can!

Goodgym York - challenge accepted

Having bumped into GG York trainer Egg over the weekend and been filmed taking part in the November press-up challenge I was keen for the rest of GG Bristol to show GG York what they were made of. And even after carting all those beds around, I am proud to say that everyone still had some energy to complete the 14 press ups that were due today! Top work everyone!!

Mel - GG Bristol Centurion

And finally, congratulations to Mel for reaching 100 good deeds today. This was celebrated in some style with a GG Bristol arch through which she duly ran - along with Clo who was celebrating 3rd placed female in the 10k last weekend ... and a few other random people who happened to be walking through Queen Square

Mel then duly donned the GG Centurion outfit and happily had brought plenty of cake to celebrate!