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 a bumper night of GoodGym tonight in Bristol with 50 runners and 8 people joining us for the first time: welcome Patricia, Ailish, Joe, Kate, Jonny, Thomas, Lucy and Cavid!

Skipping prison

We quickly split into our two groups for the evening. Alice W was taking a group to The Island, an arts and events charity, on a 2km round trip. When they arrived, they were set to work with filling the skip that they had hired specially for GoodGym's arrival with all sorts of no-longer usable chairs and tables. The team worked in super-fast time and soon the skip was filled. Tom then gave them a tour of the space to give them a bit more of an idea of the work they do. This included a trip to the underground cells and an arts space which was so 'arty' that it inspired the group to do a Mannequin Challenge in it... Spot the blinkers.

Meanwhile the rest of the group headed on a 7km run to help LitterArti in Easton. They paint pillars in an underpass which has a skatepark in it. This is used regularly by local people and children, but the council do not keep it litter-free. Therefore, it is down to volunteers to do this. The group of 33 armed themselves with litter-pickers, bin bags, recycling bags and gloves and got to work. They spread over the area and, with the help of a couple of the skate-park users, teamed together to gather 24 bags of rubbish and recycling, as well as several sofas, a mattress and more. There was an incredible difference in the 20 minutes the team worked, so much so that the skaters gave them a round of applause when we headed off for our run home.

On our return we had a game of Runner, Runner, the GoodGym version of British Bulldogs to get rid of any leftover energy, then got excited for this weekend's South West Summer Party hearing the line-up from Matt. It's not to be missed!

Suns out, run out

We had 7 new runners join us tonight and 52 people out Good Deeding on this sunny Tuesday night. Welcome to Bex, Molly, Jayne, Sangrita, Laura, Andreas and Hannah - it was great to have you!

After a mental warm-up, we split into two groups.

Alison led a small group of 15 to Dame Emily Park where they met Mel to add to their team and Ursula who runs the project. The boys (under the (quickly corrected) assumption that they were stronger) were handed spades and a pick axe to put some shrubs in to create a border between the border and the Caretaker's house. The rest of the group tackled the planters outside the swimming pool, planting new trees and small flowers in them. Another group were sent to seed wildflowers at the bottom edge of the park and two others filled watering cans to water everything in. Meanwhile, Darren was working especially hard by keeping Ursula's little boy entertained in a football game - someone's gotta do it, isn't that right Darren?!

An elephant of sand

The rest of us headed off in our hoards to St Paul's Adventure Playground. We were met by Guy who had three huge tasks for the group - good job who brought so many pairs of hands. Group 1 were set to work with moving hay to make a soft landing under the zipline and play areas. Group 2 were moving large logs to a log store on the other side of the playground, which involved impressive log-carrying coordination (I have seen groups doing it worse in Highland Games). Group 3 had the mammoth task of moving a massive pile of cement blocks and two tonnes of sand to clear a space for the bread oven arriving tomorrow. It was hefty work and the team made the longest GoodGym human chain ever to overcome the task. The last bag of sand was moved with seconds to spare before we had to head back and Guy was thrilled with how much we had got done.

Shell shock

The group were not getting away to feast on Lisa's amazing 200 celebration baking without finishing off the night with an egg and spoon race. With only 2 drops (and consequent burpees) it turns out this might be our calling. Then it was time to celebrate the wonderful [Lisa] hitting her 200th Good Deed last Saturday - well done Lisa! Still drooling over those cakes...

And at least I've not cracked all my best egg jokes before the end of the report.

It was great to have Ben and Maz join us for the first time tonight, and to see Robin and Will again after breaks!

Once we had warmed up, Patrick led a small super speedy group to Strawberry Lane Allotments to finish the job we started there a few weeks' ago. Tonight, this was the big task of shifting one hundred 25 kilogram bags of sand and gravel down the steps at the allotment. With just seven pairs of hands willing to take on the challenge and a tough uphill 5km run to get there, it was a huge job. However, the guys still did it in record time before doing some more record timings back down to get back just in time for 8pm. Impressive stuff!

The rest of us started on our own long run to Zion Bristol. This was a new task, so it was great to meet Jess there and get stuck in (even if we had to tackle a big hill of our own to get there!). Jess from Zion explained to us that they are a super busy community hub, with the cafe during the day and 200-300 events per year on there in the evenings. This means there are a lot of odd jobs and cleaning jobs which the small team do not have time for. She was incredibly organised and had a list of tasks and laid out equipment for us to get our hands on.

The outdoor team got to work weeding, brushing pavements, clearing gutters, litter-picking, cleaning outdoor furniture and Mair and Olivia showed their artistic skills while giving the outdoor toilet a repaint.

Meanwhile, the indoor team had a big cleaning job on their hands from all the tinies who had been there over the past weeks. The chair team screwed all the legs fully back on and gave them all a good clean. All the surfaces were scrubbed and Dave got to work cleaning the toilet. Russ led a team with a long felt contraption and three pairs of hands to clean the metal beams.

Before long, it was time to eat the pastries Jess had kindly provided for us and get jogging (thankfully downhill) back home.

Tonight's pun credits to Shreena (as does the Task Finisher award of the night - thanks Shreena!).

When you're leading a GoodGym run for the first time, it's really lovely (very scary) to have Ivo, the illustrious founder of GoodGym, along for the ride. We're sure Shona is enjoying her holiday whilst we keep up the good deeds in Bristol. My Shona impression went down very well, and we were very efficient at shooing the baby starfish.

Although the run was advertised as 9K, I reassured everyone it was more like 0.9K, and it was actually only 0.6K when we'd crossed all three zebra crossings to safely arrive at FaithSpace. The lovely organisers wanted some help with gardening, mainly turning over some huge compost heaps, and some leaflet distributing for their upcoming Autumn Extravaganza. WIth 37 GooodGymmers we soon made short shrift of the leafleting and were able to head off for some extra fitness training by running around the Harbour Loop with a few challenges thrown in by the run leaders - thanks Paul, Dave, Gary and everyone else who took off around the harbour, and to our gardening run leaders Alison, Jack, Patrick and Maria. We have left another organisation utterly impressed with what we can achieve. And had a surprising 5K extra run on a lovely evening in Bristol.

A big Bristol GG welcome to Robin and João who joined us for the first time, we hope to see you again very soon.

Celebration time back at Queens Square after cool down and stretches, Mair has reached the great milestone of 50 good deeds and introduced the alternative and VERY popular celebration treat of chocolate buttons. They were perfect with a pot of tea.

Thanks for being kind to me as I was being Fake Shona I. Fake Shona II takes over next week...