The nature of groups is that people come and go, new people arrive and love the support and camaraderie running with a GoodGym group brings, whilst old friends depart as their lives begin to take a different course. Last night it was the latter as Mark Donnelley did his final run with the group before permanently moving away from the area. Mark has been an avid Huddersfield GoodGymmer, bringing plenty of laughs and hard work to all our GoodGym sessions over the summer. We of course wish him well, and if he ever returns to Yorkshire and needs a bit of hard labour on a Tuesday evening he will be very welcome back.

Mark had picked a great task for his final session, once again we were off to Little Deer Wood Activity Centre to have another go at their Mahoosive Mound of Mud. In order to make space for a new storage shed, the centre requires a huge pile of mud and builders rubble to be moved, which provides a great workout for us GoodGymmers and a is project which I suspect will keep us busy for many months to come.

Another advantage of this job is the fact we are able to meet and run from a different site, so instead of the Stadium our meeting point was Battyeford Sporting Club. From there Kati Law, Ben Godfrey, Davis Bilton, Mark Donnelley and myself set forth across the muddy football pitches, cycleway and decidedly wet canal towpath for the 2.5K run to Little Deer Wood. As usual by the time we arrived the place was buzzing, with kids engaged with gardening, woodworking and all manner of other activities under the centre’s floodlights. Having some decent lighting is such a luxury for us GoodGymmers, being able to work with more illumination than the meagre glow of a head-torch provides always makes the task far more enjoyable.

Martin from the Centre met us and was keen to give us a choice of tasks, either tidying a willow hedge or continuing the battle with the Mahoosive Mound. It was Kati who instantly made the decision on behalf of the group, and we were straight out with the spades and wheelbarrows and onto the Mahoosive Mound. Whenever we have tackled the mound before conditions have been dry, but this time things were entirely different. Copious rainfall over the last few weeks had turned the soil to sticky mud, making it heavy to shift and hard to push through the wire basket riddler to sieve out unwanted rocks and stones.

However GoodGym are always up for a challenge, and so the next 50 minutes were spent slowly creating good well graded topsoil which could be used to pot plants for sale at Little Deer’s forthcoming Christmas Fayre. Our efforts managed to create about half a dozen barrowloads of good soil, and we all had a good chat whilst we laboured so it wasn’t an entirely wasted effort.

The run back to Battyeford consisted of another couple of muddy playing fields, something of a feature of GoodGym runs recently, and excellent training for those who will be running in the forthcoming cross country season! Thanks to all last night’s GoodGymmers for another great effort, it goes without saying that you are a lovely herd of little dears 🦌🦌🦌🦌🦌!