What better way to spend a post-parkrun sunny Autumn morning than flipping overgrown weed membranes and re-making paths with bark?

Four Goodgym folk arrived at the YUMI (York Unifying Multicultural Initiative) allotments near Millennium Bridge to meet Helen and Sarah and get instructions. It's a great project allowing people new to York from other countries and cultures to grow food from back home and share their cuisine with us.

First we barrowed and carried 20 bales of bark across the allotments before getting stuck into the task proper. This involved yanking up the old path liner, cleaning it of old roots and weeds and flipping it over. We then added new liner over the top and capped it all off with a fresh layer of bark.

The whole site was criss-crossed with pathways so it was onto the next path and the next. The YUMI volunteers were all pitching in too.

**YUMI volunteer - "Ah GoodGym are here! They'll make swift work of this!"

Nick - 'how do you know about GoodGym?'

YUMI volunteer - "Egg Cameron - she's done incredible things for the city of York!"

Katie was stuck into pulling the couch grass roots out of the liner (essential and meticulous task) while Barbara and Nick were flipping more membranes and Christine was describing some weird Brazilian martial art combat dance that as far as I can recall seemed to involve head stands, self-defence, acrobatics and singing while playing a tall musical instrument with a wire and pebble somehow involved. Clearly she was making this up as some kind of trick on me - I got home and found out it's an actual thing called capoeira - who knew!

Just over an hour later and most of the paths were nearing completion, we had found a buried bike, dug up various fragrant roots and paused for a slice of Russian apple cake (proper yummy!) and tea and coffee before heading for home.

Oh and most important of all, Darren was there with his wife and young family, working alongside us and swapping stories of his first marathon last week and within 15 minutes of meeting us we had indoctrinated him into the cult of GoodGym, he was all joined up on his phone and booked up for Monday's group run!

GoodGym York - spreading the bark and spreading the GoodGym gospel!