The excitement had been building all week as we prepared for Goodgym Colchester's first birthday!

We gathered at Leisure World and welcomed new runner Vanessa, and handed out party hats to everyone. It was going to be a challenge to run to the food bank with birthday balloons and party hats, but a challenge we felt confident completing.

When we arrived at the foodbank, regular parkrun volunteer Mr Singh was there - he'd come to join in and help us with our cleaning. This is a low stock time of year for the foodbank, so there was a lot fewer crates to move. This meant we were able to clean a larger portion of the floor in the warehouse than usual.

With 14 of us (the same number as our launch a year ago), we had plenty of people to clean the whole area and we were done in 25 minutes. As we have been coming back to clean every few months, its now a quick and easy task, and we can clearly see the difference, compared to when we came a year ago, and the dust was so thick in places.

When we were done we had a mini party. Susie's gluton free, dairy free Chocolate Orange Cake was devoured by Tav, and the rest of us enjoyed the cakes that the Foodbank volunteers had made for us, as well as some delicious brownies that Jade brought.

We did a fartlek run back to Leisure World, and then some of us made our way to Three Wise Monkeys for a quick bite and a drink, and we had a candle to sing happy birthday to ourselves with.

We've had an amazing year, helping so many charities and community organisations in Colchester, but now we all want to focus on increasing the Missions and Coach pairings in Colchester.