Another beautiful evening for a group run at Ockwells Park! As we hit the mid-point of the school Summer holidays, lots of our regular GoodGymers were away, so we were a small team but that didn't stop Amy, Juli, Roberta, Matt and Georgeta from having a lovely active and productive evening.

On our run to the task we sent Juli and Matt on an extra lap of the field next to the playground and challenged them to chase down the rest of us. They did really well and re-joined us just as we reached the path through Little Thrift Wood. Together the five of us dodged the mud, confirming that lots more woodchip is definitely needed on the path! Thank goodness Matt is leading a community mission to sort that out next Wednesday. Sign up to join him here...it promises to be a barrow of laughs!

Our task this evening was to continue weeding around the saplings at the New Thrift Wood planting site, giving them space and light to thrive. This was a job we started a couple of weeks ago and our experience this evening was similar to that first session: we did find a few dead saplings (the piles of canes and anti-rabbit coils you can see us holding in the photos were from the dead trees), but they were far outnumbered by the living, and it was heart-warming to see progress from our tree planting and acorn planting last Autumn - tasks that Amy, Georgeta and Juli all helped with. New Thrift Wood may not resemble the neighbouring woodland for another couple of centuries, but we feel confident we will see real changes within our lifetimes (especially if we all keep GoodGyming so we're still running these paths in our 90s...)

In the last session we managed to work our way eight posts along the North side of the deer fence and this evening we managed another eight posts worth. This took us all the way to the 'kink' in the fence - at least a quarter of the perimeter done!

After much weeding and chatter, we tidied up and headed back to the car park - this time taking a slightly longer route around the South side of the planting site and then looping onto the less muddy path adjacent to Ockwells Manor. Again we challenged Matt and Juli to an extra 500m, which they zoomed round, arriving at our starting point at about the same time as the rest of us.

Then Amy and Juli both pulled some surprises out of their bags. Amy's was a handful of resistance bands, which we used in our fitness session, adding some extra intensity to our squats, leg lifts, arm drills and erm...penguin walks. Juli's surprise was even more enjoyable - home made carrot cake! Absolutely scrumptious and the perfect way to round off the evening.