Another mattress and duvet shifting community mission in the bag. Our full compliment of six arrived in good time and waited patiently for the van, catching up on life, GoodGym and running while we waited and chatting with the shelter volunteers who reported that they'd had a successful event the previous week, housing 8 homeless people for the night.

They'd also had the good sense to keep a parking space available for the van with traffic cones which also caused one parent arriving to drop of the kids for a dance class to just park their car in the middle of the road and cause a wee traffic disruption.

Then the van arrived and we got our shift on armed with duvets and mattress which were moved inside and onto the stage in the hall in no time at all. Pulling the curtains to provide some cover and discourage the young dancers from having a kip half way through their class, we were done and headed off into the weekend.

Nifty indeed!

Celebrations galore

Another massive night of celebrations at GoodGym Bristol - MASSIVE congratulations to our latest Centurion, Caroline, who earned her 100th Good Deed tonight! It was a pleasure getting to celebrate it with you (sorry, Sheffield!) and you sported the Centurion outfit with grace! Not only this, it was Danica and Mair's first day of celebrating a new year (Happy birthday both!), and it was Paul's first group run since he hit his 400th Good Deed at the weekend (what a hero)! Between all these celebrations, it is amazing that we managed to get a task done. But, do not despair, I have tales of not one, but two Good Deeds we successfully completed tonight...

Welcome to the new runners, Georgia, Lawrence, Jack and Deborah who joined us tonight! It was great to meet you all and we hope to see you all back soon.

A puzzling task

After a warm-up - which primarily got the GoodGym brains cooking but also managed to get their legs pumping - the Walking Group set off on their merry way and the remaining huge group of runners bunched our way across Castle Park with fab back-marking from Dave.

The team split into two and Alice led a bunch of 20 GoodGymers inside Emmaus. Emmaus help homeless people to get their lives back on track with housing and employment opportunities. Tonight, the group were helping sort out the warehouse. This largely included sorting the puzzles and games donations, which resulted in the GoodGymers brains being further exercised - what a mental workout of an evening!

Alice finally managed to pull the team away from their puzzles to say goodbye to Emmaus until next time (where there is some talk of smashing concrete, stay tuned...).

Don't leave any doors a-jar

Meanwhile, the rest of the group were being briefed on the brand new sport Marmalade Orienteering. The Marmalade Trust is a wonderful small charity in Bristol which puts on Christmas lunches for older people who would otherwise be alone on Christmas day. As they are a tiny charity, they rely on volunteers to help them as much as possible. Our Good Deed orienteers split into five teams to hunt down community hot-spots to post referral letters and posters to. Along the way, they dropped even more posters off at places in the community where older people might see the opportunity.

With points and prizes up for grabs, the teams ran quickly and worked fast. They chose different tactics - while the Green Team stayed close to get the first-back points, the Red Team went big on the additional community spots points. It was all to play for, and then some delayed returns and an incredibly questionable points system meant to Green Team won with a whopping 1150 points! The other teams ap-peeled the points system and the prizes were shared by everyone (apart from the marmalade, which will be fueling Dave's mornings for the comings weeks).

After all that sticky work, the group ran back with only one stop for squats and lunges and were soon settled in to a pile of 100-winged cakes baked by Caroline's fair hand.

Well done everyone and well done again to Caroline for her 100th Good Deed!

Feeling hot, hot, hot

On the hottest day of 2018 so far, our gaggle of GoodGymers were not intimidated by the sun which was still blasting as we gathered for our Tuesday evening run. It was great to have James and Nicole join us tonight for the first time - welcome both. And a massive congratulations to Chris and Caroline who both achieved their 200th Good Deeds tonight, fantastic!

Nailing it at Felix Road Adventure Playground

After we got even warmer through, well, warming up, the group split into two to spread our Good Deeds around Bristol. Sally did a great job of leading her first group run and took a group to Felix Road Adventure Playground. The group got stuck in with sorting the massive amounts of wood they have at the playground, removing nails so that it can be reused around the playground and in the pizza oven.

Planking at Emmaus

The rest of the group went to Emmaus, where we finally conquered the prickly bushes last month. Xanne introduced the new runners to the wonderful work Emmaus do to help people who have experienced homelessness or are currently suffering from homelessness in Bristol.

Following Xanne's warnings, the brave members of the group ventured to the mezzanine of the warehouse to forage a path through piles of furniture, Christmas decorations (much to the joy of Mr Christmas a.k.a. Richard), exercise balls and whatever else you could possibly think of. This will make the warehouse a much safer place to be again for the people using it. And we got to try on hats, so it was a double win.

The other half of the group put in a brilliant effort sanding, soap washing and painting planks which are going to be used to put up new shelfing. Cue a selection of fantastic NSFW puns by the group on wood and nails...

THE 1(.2 ) kilometre time trial of the year

On return from Emmaus and Felix Road Adventure Playground, Bristol GoodGym held their very own 1 kilometre time trial for the GoodGym Olympics. With some outstanding 1km efforts, including Patrick, Darren and Gary fighting a very close race to the finish - brilliant efforts by everyone who took part and fantastic cheering by the cheering squad!