What a strange saying, ‘many happy returns of the day!” A phrase you only really see written in old fashioned birthday cards, I guess it means I hope you have a lovely day on your birthday and that you have many more happy birthdays to come. Well this week was a special birthday for Goodgym as we celebrated 10 years of getting fit by doing good. And here’s to many more happy returns of today!

A bumper crop of 4 first timers tonight as we welcomed Tom, Tiger, Oliver & Natasha. Great to have you along, hope to see you all again!

Regular task owner Cllr David Gibson met us at the bottom of Southover Street, where a sub group of Frannie, Sherman & Juliette did a little bit of painting over graffiti and litter picking. Regular runners will know that we have painted over a huge amount of scribbling in this area but every time we visit it seems like there is a little bit less, so we have definitely made a huge difference, and I know local residents are very grateful for our efforts.

The bulk of us headed up to May Road, right at the top of Elm Grove, one of Brighton’s biggest hills so well done to us! This is a road that has overcome huge anti social behaviour problems by local residents deciding enough is enough and getting together to take back control! It’s a really nice road with lots of trees and shrubs that all need a bit of pruning and TLC. Daisy and Amy set us to work on clearing suckers from the bases of trees, pruning some buddleia, pulling out weeds from the cracks in the pavement and general weeding and tidying up. In about 25 minutes we got loads done and Daisy was delighted with how much we achieved.

Back to sea level for a fitness session on the Level. Just time for a 6 minute AMRAP (as many reps as possible) of 10 curtsey lunges, 10 hop squats, 10 crunches and 10 shuttle runs to keep in with the 10 years birthday theme!

From there some of us went straight on to Bardleys for our fish’n’chips birthday celebrations whist the rest ran back to base to gather belongings before joining up with the rest of the gang. We had 18 of us at the celebrations, including Michael who’s been unable to run for a few weeks due to injury, hope to have you back in a couple of weeks.

Big thanks to Juliet for organising the social, apparently she’s already decided where we’re going for Christmas!

Well done to all, here’s to another 10 years of getting fit by making a difference!