Last night 39 runners turned Blue Monday GoodGym Red, running 4k to dig over an outdoor learning space at a local school, to take on a fitness session and to beat the January blues!

Good News

A huge welcome to Hugh, Roisin, Caitlin and Hazel who all came for their first group run tonight - give them a cheer when you see them!

GoodGym has some £10 community entry places for the Big Half happening in London on Sunday 10th March. If you're interested please email bighalf@goodgym.org. Deadline for applications is Wednesday 30th January. Names will be drawn at random from those who want a place. It's a great race, and very well organised, so if you're after a goos half marathon, whether it be your first or if you're chasing that PB, then why not give it a go.

We're getting closer and closer to that January challenge target! We've done a massive 168 good deeds out of a target of 220, and have 1192 kilometres under our belt out of a target of 3000km. There's still a little way to go, but well done for being part of the massive wave of good happening across the country at the moment!

A big round of applause went to Sarah who reached that magic milestone - 100 good deeds. That's a huge amount of digging, cleaning, planting, sorting, and general good-doing and who knows how many planks! Brilliant.

We dug our task last night

After all that good news we were ready to head outside for our warm up, and kicked off our third run of 2019 with some high knees, heel flicks, fast feet and, given that it was rubbish old Blue Monday, a discussion about what makes us feel happy. Food, hugs, rest, burritos, our friends, wine, books and of course GoodGym were all sources of joy for us!

Our job last night was at Chirstchurch school, a local primary school which has an enormous project they are undertaking. So after a speedy 1.5 km run down the hill stopping only to do some toe taps to keep our heart rates and body temperatures up, we arrived to find Barry the site manager with a whole load of spades and a big job for us.

The learning space is going to be for all the kids and visitors, and will feature hives, composting, teaching areas and lots of other fun elements, but the area first needs to be prepped for such a large endeavour. They've raised the money for this incredible project themselves, but need a hand from volunteers, and GoodGym is always happy to help out! So after putting on gloves and grabbing tools, we got stuck in digging over the soil, picking out stones for repurposing elsewhere and getting rid of weeds. After 40 minutes of work we called it a night - but we'll be back soon to help with the next stage!

We nipped across the road for our fitness session, which started with a game of clusters, and then moved on to a more intense workout which featured repeated inchworms, vertical jumps, shuffles, plank knee taps and more. Conditioning is important to protect against injury, increase strength and improve overall fitness, so well done on working hard last night.

All that was left was a quick run home and that last hill, before stretches and lots and lots of cake. Nice work everyone! Next week we have a great new (indoor!) task and a choice of two runs. What are you waiting for, sign up here!.

We also have the first of our monthly socials coming up soon - check out the details here and sign up!