Goodgym Hero of the Week, Mikaela, was joined by twelve deputy heroes on the High Street tonight to do some gardening for Colchester in Bloom. After a briefing from Tav, we ran and walked to the meeting point to get our instructions. Armed with garden bags and tools we made short work of emptying ten two-tier planters of old plants, ready for the new ones tomorrow. The task was a repeat of the one in May, although this time it didn't end in free rhubarb for the runners! We piled our heavy bags of plants into Pam's car, and headed off for some hill sprints, supported by Stu, Hels, and Yee, shouting encouragement and shining some extra lights! 👍 😁 👏 A fantastic run, walk, cycle and task this evening, well done everyone!

Mikaela is in the exclusive 50 good deeds club - Alistair broke past 10 good deeds. And the moon came out to celebrate with us! One small good deed for Colchester, one giant leap for the Benson siblings!

I also heard a rumour that Dan is in the top 5 of the Pride of Essex Awards in his category. Wow. https://www.prideofessexawards.org.uk/

OK...here is what happened: We all met at The Gym as Dan, Alistair and Mikaela enjoyed running down Ipswich road but did not enjoy running up the Hill to town! For us we parked at Leisure World with all the litter picking equipment (note that it took longer to drive to Leisure World than run...Colchester that is not good enough - get out your car, put a waterproof on a walk. Stuart did not notice us but he over took us 3 times on foot on North Station Road) and ran up to The Gym. We shared the news of Vanessa's Cambridge half Marathon success and the aforementioned achievements then set off past the green spooky Castle to Leisure World. We found plenty of litter at the Skate Park and around the cricket pitch - as usual close to the empty bins! McDonald's rubbish galore and energy drinks in bushes. After we collect two bags of rubbish we did some relay sprints that involved 3 shuttle runs whilst a team mate did squats, reverse lunges and mountain climbers.

A jolly lovely night I would say....

On a crisp Autumnal evening five Goodgymers hit the streets and paths to pick up litter and get fit. Under the watch of the half moon, Jupiter and Saturn we ran across town to a few well used paths that connect people with the lovely Hilly Fields, the Colchester Insitute and also to our town centre. The vegetation was pretty thick in the summer and recently the council had cut the plants back to reveal the path but also to reveal a lot of litter.

We only litter picked for aroun 30 minutes but filled a bag with beer bottles and cans, crisp packets, plastic bottles and more...perhaps the bins need to be painted bright yellow or perhaps the Scandinavian idea of returning empties and receiving money back is a better incentive. Either way we helped keep wildlife safe, children safe and pets too.

Our fitness session began when our jog became a hill sprint. With Ella's legs recovering well from Manchester Marathon she was the 'hare' and the greyhounds set off to catch her before she reached the top of the hill at the High Street. A lovely surprise was seeing Vanessa at the top as she celebrated good news from her physio with a run!

We went to Firstsite to do a circuit session. With five shuttle runs sprints as our timer we Tricep-dipped, press-upped, squat jumped and mountain climbed our way through a great session.

Well done everyone!

We travelled to the familiar site of the foodbank at Moorside to see a not so familiar sight. The warehouse was empty of all tins, boxes and racking which usually filled the now surprisingly spacious warehouse. Our last task to help the foodbank was to help with painting the warehouse as agreed with the landlord prior to leaving with foodbank operations moved to a larger location.

Saturday’s team got to filling, scraping, brushing, cleaning and taping the huge space, essential before any painting could be done. It was good to catch up with familiar faces and some new such as Tiffany who was joining for her second GoodGym task. Various members of the team took to the task with different approaches, some on tip toes (Ella), some in clothes completely unsuited to painting (Nick), and some plotting plans to paint messages to be found by tenants in the future (Tav and don’t worry, we painted over it). Radio one was blasting away until Alistair suggested we listened to Mikaela’s working from home song which we were all thoroughly impressed with. This was followed by a strange assortment of indie hits thrown up by the Spotify algorithm (other music streaming services are available) and a good amount of chat about vaccines, apprenticeships and of course, hopes of restrictions being lifted. Before we knew it, we had been in the warehouse for 2 and a half hours, having painted most of the main warehouse and it was time to go.