A big Brighton Goodgym welcome to Sean and Mari who joined us for the first time tonight, great to have you on board!

In tonight’s news we congratulated the ever speedy Helena for being the first lady to finish at Hove Prom parkrun on Saturday when we had our parkrun meet up. And also big up to the ever improving Michael who is going through that fantastic period when you are reasonably new to running where you get a PB on practically every outing! He knocked another 50 seconds from his parkrun PB to finish in under 26 minutes. Marvellous!

We were a cosy, small group of 10 tonight and it was lovely to chat as a group during our steady run along the seafront to tonight’s task. The Hop 50+ Community Cafe is a great fit for Goodgym as they do amazing work in reducing social isolation amongst those over 50. During the day the place is buzzing with people dropping in for lunch or coffee or taking part in some of the fantastic activities organised by the energetic Lin and her team. Only another 2 1/2 years and I’ll be down there myself!

We set straight to work on sanding down the filled holes, cutting in and rollering and before you knew it we’d changed the tired old grey to a much fresher Egyptian Cotton. The two biggest walls were all but complete with their first coat and we will be returning next week for coat number two and again in the future to do the end walls. Great work team!

We set off back to base along the seafront where we did some Fartlek running. This is a Swedish word which translates as ‘speed play’ so you just throw in some bursts of speed as and when you feel like it, e.g to the next lamp post or up and down the ramp etc. We were back at the YHA in no time and whilst stretching down Sean had the brilliant suggestion of turning my ‘Paint Hop Pro’ pun into the beauty you see above. *Genius! *