They say an apple a day is all you need - but every so often you also need diplomacy and negotiation skills.

Today was that day …

14 of the GG Sheffield crew met at the Meersbrook & Heely Allotments to help Gareth from Regather harvest a huge batch of apples from a number of allotments.

A big welcome to Daiana on her 1st Good Gym deed and many congratulations to David on his 50th - he will be wearing his 50GGSheff bow tie at our 2nd birthday bash.

Full credit to all those who ran there - in some cases after long training runs. And to those who ran back home after a pie and a pint! Kudos if you’re on Strava; respect if you’re not.

Diplomacy & Negotiation #1 We met at the gate and immediately found ourselves in a diplomatic crisis. We were somehow mistaken for protestors who were trying to blockade the allotments! If we’d been in America this would have been a full DefCon2 situation. I confess I may, inadvertently, and assuming this was a joke, have escalated matters by saying we were there to shut down the allotments as there was a security alert. However, having been told not to joke with the gentleman in question (although I do now regret not asking him to step out of his car so that we could search it) we did the only think I could think of … and ran off to our first allotment.

Carrying assorted ladders, boxes, bins and tools we headed out to try and find the allotment numbers we had been given permission to pick from – there are over 300, so at times it felt a bit like being on the Crystal Maze.

Nevertheless, between us, we managed to locate and then pick, pluck and shake apples from four large allotments and pretty much fill the back of the Regather van.

We then retired to The Crown to enjoy the late autumn sun in the beer garden and lunch with, ironically, every flavour of pie except apple.

Diplomacy & Negotiation #2 If a pub menu only has 6 pies on it, together one or two sides, it shouldn’t take too long to put in an order. I’m sorry to have to report that Tom2 took 45 minutes to order his food. Some say that they served it before he’d finished ordering it. There was obviously a miscommunication issue somewhere along the way …

But, in the end, we all got our food and had a great chat – on conversations as wide ranging as crystal meth factories, Las Vegas and James Bond - Is there a theme there GG Sheffield???

Now, I hear you saying, where are all the apple puns in this report?

Well … this was GG Sheffield’s 4th apple related run / mission in as many weeks and, despite some valiant efforts on the What’s App(le) group (special mention to Annie for “peeling my age after a long run”), I felt we would be would be really scrapping the barrel if we just regathered the previous weeks’ puns …

So instead, let’s do something different - have a listen to this playlist of Guardian readers' fruit inspired songs!

https://www.theguardian.com/music/musicblog/2013/mar/21/readers-recommend-songs-fruit

IMPORTANT UPDATE

Since this mission Tom2 has been elevated to Britain’s Chief Brexit Negotiator and Andrew has been arrested under the anti-terrorism legislation.

Neither of them are likely to appear at Good Gym events for some time …