🥶 24 intrepid and impressive GoodGymmers met on a bitterly cold Monday evening for our weekly group run. We congratulated the excellent people who had run and volunteered at Brass Monkey yesterday, and celebrated the £646 we raised for York Mind through our Santa collections with York Rotary before Christmas 🎅

💙 We stayed inside for as long as possible then bade farewell to our walking group before heading outside to “warm up” (or cool down) whilst discussing things that lift our spirits on Blue Monday. From exercise (yay!) to beverages to Yorkshire puddings, it boosted our mood just to hear of them 💪

🏃‍♀️🏃‍♂️ It was quickly time to head off though so Leanne led our running group to Millennium Fields. We needed further instruction/clarification from Nicola to find her but we soon did and were met by fellow GG-ers who had cycled to join us 🚲

🌺 Nicola gave us our instructions and we cracked on with our soil inversion (in pursuit of creating a wildflower meadow). There were some different approaches to this (ultimately quite challenging) task, with some folks going alone while others following the motto that “teamwork makes from dreamwork”. There were also differences in terms of both the size and shape of individual inversion patches 🌸

🔺 We had two groups, one inverting a big (blob-shaped?!) patch, the other inverting a triangular patch. It was exciting to see the different techniques and to be impressed by everyone’s efforts (I’ve tried inversion before and failed fairly miserably) 🙌

👍 It was soon time to finish, though not before inverting two large patches (that Nicola thought it would have taken at least 25 hours for her to do herself!) We’ll hopefully be back to finish off at some point ⏱

📸 After a quick group photo, we attempted a monkey-based fitness session, along to “I wanna be like you”. Various mishaps (entirely my fault) meant that we only got halfway through the song but it was a joy (and we should definitely do more sessions that allow an element of dance within them) 💃🕺

❄️ The temperature was well below freezing by this point so it was definitely time to head back, with walking, running and cycling groups all heading the same way ➡️

🙆‍♀️ After a quick stretch and discussion of upcoming tasks, it was definitely time to head to the warmer environs of the pub 🍻

🤩 Thank you so much for coming out in the (freezing) cold today, it was great to get lots done and we’ll hopefully see you at one of our (many) other sessions this week 😁