9 GoodGym volunteers made it up the hill to Odd Down Sports Cafe for the last Group Run of 2018 to write Christmas cards for community meals. We ran a hilly 6.5km in total. We enjoyed ourselves and had a great workout!

January targets, sign-up to Strava!

We met at the Leisure Centre and shared our GoodGym news. As a group we have set ourself the ambitious challenge of running 500km and completing 100 good deeds in January. As long as you do at least one good deed in January every kilometre that you record on Strava (even if it isn't a GoodGym run!) still goes towards our target, so please sign up to Strava (it's free!) and link Strava to your GoodGym account (GoodGym Settings -> Strava/RunKeeper). Together we can do this and win the Golden Trowel!

Oh rein-deary me, that was hilly run!

We ran by the river, up Holloway and then up Bloomfield Drive. There were some amazingly decorated Christmas houses on the way up, including one mesmerising laser-light show! The hill is particularly steep but with typical GoodGym spirit we all made it up together! We always have at least one dedicated backmarker (thanks Alison and Emily!) to make sure that noone gets left behind and we all make it up together.

Volunteering the write way!

We arrived at Odd Down Sports Cafe and met our host Dave. He told us how over the next week the Cafe is hosting several Christmas meals for members of the Odd Down community. For most of us, Christmas is a time to enjoy time with friends and family. However, often the people that come to these meals are isolated and sadly don't have any visitors over Christmas. So our task was a really important way of helping avoid loneliness and fostering a sense of community.

Holly cow that was fun!

Our task was to write and decorate Christmas cards to make sure that everyone at the meals gets at least one Christmas card. This will help remind them that they are part of the Odd Down community and bring them some Christmas joy. We really enjoyed using our GoodGym creativity to create some festive illustrations: there was plenty of holly, lots of Christmas trees, several jingle bells, a fa-la-la-la-la-la-la-llama and at least one Christmas penguin. After stacking our pile of envelopes we headed back down the hill to the Leisure Centre.

Thanks to Alison and Emily for backmarking for us and thanks to Nicola for the pun this week!

As mentioned above, please sign up and link to Strava to help us meet our GoodGym January target!

Next runs

• There is no Group Run on Tuesday 25th December or Tuesday 1st January!
• We have a fun and really useful Community Mission on Saturday 5th January. Sign up here!
• We have already got group runs and socials booked in for whole of January (woo!). Sign up here!

Social Media

Please like/follow us on social media and share/retweet our content! We are on Facebook and Twitter.

Organisations are already getting in contact with us through these platforms and this means we are securing more varied tasks for you to enjoy!

Finally, thank you to all of our volunteers and all our partners for their tireless hard work and dedication improving our local community. We couldn't to this without you! Have a great Christmas and Emily and I are looking forward to seeing you out running in 2019!