GoodGym Oxford: The Nearly Halloween Edition!

'Twas the nightmare before Halloween, and all through the Ark-T House
The GoodGymers were working, from Taffies to Scouse
The toys were all placed on the shelves with great care
In the hopes that the kids would find them easily there
The children all nestled so snug in their beds
While visions in sports kit worked hard wearing red
Alison in her Garland, and I in my Cape
Swept sand from the pathways and had a great jape
When out in the alley there rose such a clatter
As GoodGymers picked litter with some fun friendly chatter
Around the whole playground we flew like a flash
Moving scooters and push cars to avoid any crash
The moon rising high on this Halloween-eve
Lighting up piles of newly swept leaves
When what to our wondering eyes should appear
But a slide good for adults once the debris was clear
Then waving the flag and striking a pose
Before running away on the route Anwen chose
And we heard them exclaim as they ran out of sight
That a Halloween task was such a Good Night.

Ark-T Centre had put out an SOS for help clearing up their outdoor spaces - litter-picking along the lane outside the centre and tidying up the play area.

As a small community arts centre they don't have the funding to pay for extra help with jobs like this, so some GoodGym muscle can make all the difference. With a massive 23 runners we certainly had plenty of people to tackle the task in hand!

In keeping with Halloween we grabbed brooms, less in keeping with Halloween we also grabbed litter-pickers, and set to work. There were sand and leaves to be swept up, plastic toys to be put away, mud kitchen equipment to be returned to shelves, litter to be picked both from the playground and the lane outside, and some weeds and dead plants to be cleared off the banks. Fresh from his beach holiday Mark couldn't resist channelling Robinson Crusoe and leaving a message in the sand, and our bedazzled (though sadly not so obvious in the photos) GoodGym flag had it's first glittering outing.

Post-task discussion of our favourite odd UK traditions brought up some ideas for 'GoodGym-on-Tour 2020'. Black Pudding Olympics, Shin-kicking at the Cotswold Olympiks, Pooh sticks, Cheese Rolling, carrying blazing barrells of tar, and then Blackpool Illuminations for a little rest.....our fitness tasks next spring will be preparing us to win at all of these events!

Garland of Joy went to Alison this week for completing the amazing-sounding Beachy Head Marathon on Saturday - and still running on Wednesday! Aoife, ever resourceful, found herself a colander of joy to complete her outfit.

Welcome to Sherleen, Walter, and Chris - lovely to have you along on your first GoodGym runs. Hope to see you back again soon!

It was wonderful to have so many of you along on my last Group Run of 2019. Trev will take the reigns from here until the end of March.

Getting GoodGym Oxford started has truly been a joy - you are all awesome people! See you in April xx

As the evenings are getting darker we're resisting the desire to hibernate, and instead we're increasing our ranks of GoodGym runners! This week we welcomed 4 runners new to GoodGym, and 1 runner new to Oxford. Welcome Penny, Anna, Ellie, Meghan, and Stephanie; lovely to meet you all.

This week Ben was the proud wearer of the Garland of Joy - congratulations on getting to your 10th Good Deed in record time Ben!

Be-garlanded, and lit up with head-torches we set out into the night...this week heading West to the Broken Spoke Bike CoOp.

The run though Oxford Centre is beautiful with all the old buildings lit up in the evening, but a bit challenging dodging other pedestrians. We successfully made it through with no collisions and no-one separated from the group, and circling around behind the Oxford Castle we were soon at the door of the workshop.

Broken Spoke Bike Co-op are a community cycling project who teach people how to fix and ride their bikes. They also recycle and refurbish donated second hand bikes. To recycle them as responsibly as they can, they take the bikes apart into their components, reusing whatever they can.

This is where GoodGym come in: dismantling bikes is a time consuming task, and many hands make light work!

Caitlin greeted us at Broken Spoke and explained a bit about their aims for the Co-Op, then dishing out aprons, gloves and tools she put us to work. We had 5 bikes to dismantle, and pile of wheels - these were bikes and wheels which were too damaged to refurbish and get back into use, so instead they get stripped down to become spares or for the metal to be recycled. Although very few of us had ever taken a bike apart before we set to work straight away - after all you can't do much harm to a bike that's being scrapped anyway! In no time at all we had 5 bikes and 15 wheels done, and gained some confidence with bike tools - a WIN-WIN. After cleaning up post-task (top tip: add used coffee grounds to your soap to clean off bike grease) we tip-toed back out into the drizzley night for the run back to base.

Rather than run the exact same way back we took a more circuitous route. Looping round the edge of the city centre we paused at the Ashmolean Museum to use their steps for calf raises and jumping exercises (FITNESS!), then ran the reverse of the Oxford Half finish sprint, before wiggling down Queens Lane and stopping for 1 minute of wall-squatting - don't worry gang - no-one thought we looked odd ;-). Avoiding a collision with the Ghost Tour headed the other way we popped out onto High Street and zoomed back to the Cowley Road.

Broken Spoke Bike Co-Op would like to make our visits a regular thing, so keep an eye on the website for the next Good Deed there.

After a week of autumnal gloom a sunny evening brought a bumper turn out of runners to East Oxford.

With one eye on the clock so that we could make it through the gate to the University Parks before locking up time, we got the run briefing underway early. Double garlands of joy were awarded this week, as both Rachael and Trev had raced at Blenheim Palace in awful conditions on Sunday. Soggy socks and blisters definitely deserve an award! We're always delighted to welcome new Oxford GoodGymers, and tonight we had a hat-trick joining us for their first Oxford Good Deeds; lovely to meet you Tom, Peter, and Callum. And with no further ado....

...we were off!!

Dodging freshers week madness in South Park we dashed past the Islamic Centre and made a beeline for Mesopotamia Walk, sliding through the gate just as it was locked behind us. It was worth it to squeeze in one last evening group run on the trails before autumn and winter restrict us to the tarmac! A beautiful run along the river, and a brief distraction on the zip wire (Sarah showing us how it's done), lead us to Raymund Road and a large pile of daffodil bulbs.

The plan by Councillor Mark Lygo is to plant spring bulbs along every grass verge in Marston over the next 18 months, to add a splash of joy and colour to the area (a use of his councillor priority fund that will make a big visual impact on the area come the spring). Our task was to get the project started by planting the length of Raymund Road, which is the main route to St Nicholas's Primary School. Instructions received from Mark, and tools kindly supplied by Alistair from Marston Community Gardens, we split into pairs, grabbed spades and bulbs, and set to work.

Half an hour and hundreds of daffodil bulbs later (and only one pogo-stick tumble; always guaranteed some fun when Aoife's around) we had planted along the length of the road, with clusters under the couple of trees at the end of the street. We'll be keen to return in March to check out the flowers! As an unexpected prize for helping out we were gifted a jar of honey by Alistair, which had to be awarded to Rachel for coming back to her first Group Run post-injury tonight, and completing her 10th Good Deed!

With darkness crowding in and an autumnal chill in the air we stashed the tools and got moving again on the run back to base. The road route is far less scenic, but with lots of chat it was still plenty of fun. Well it was until we got to South Park with 10 minutes to spare.......HILLS! HILLS! HILLS! It's so rare to find a hill in Oxford that when you do you're obligated to run a few relay hill sprints. Them's the rules.

Great work once again team.

Same time next week.