Just a team of two this week taking on the task of giving Holy Trinity Church a spring clean. It hasn't had a deep clean for months so there was plenty of dust, dirt and spider webs to clean up from between the pews.

We recruited a third team member in Henry the Hoover, appropriately wearing GoodGym red and together with our task host for the evening, Malcolm, we got active. Floors were vacuumed all over. pews were polished, floors were mopped and the church was left smelling of fresh furniture polish ready for the Easter weekend services!

This week our Group Run took us up the hill to the sunny Ferndale Leisure Gardens, an allotment space that had been underused for some time and needs the old plots clearing out of all the old junk collected by past tenants to make inviting open spaces ready for new tenants.

In this visit we tackled a tough patch that we couldn't deal with last time. There was a pile of something buried under thick brambles. This time we brought some clippers to cut away the bramble and gain access. It was a pile of corrugated metal roof panels, old windows and wooden pallets among other random buckets and broken spades and old hose pipe.

With seven of us on the case we managed to extract all the junk and carry it up the hill to the entrance gate and sorted it into piles of wood, plastic and metal which will be collected for recycling.

We'll be back here again in a few weeks because theres plenty more plots that need clearing out!

This week we welcomed newbie Stefano on his first session with GoodGym 👋 before leading the way off to the Bushmead Community Hub where we were asked to prepare the front garden area for nature-friendly planting by the Wildlife Trust.

An area previously occupied by a large bush has been cleared and woodchipped but we had to relocate the woodchip around the existing planting and turn the exposed ground over ready for some easy planting by other volunteers later this week.

We had a great bunch of GoodGymers chatting merrily while working hard at getting this task done in good time. Enjoying the benefit of daylight for the first time on a group run this year we did a great job.

All that remained was a run back into town, with a quick stop in the park for a round of exercises from the fitness dice 🎲 🎲.

The rolls of the dice gave us the following:

90s of push-ups 90s of crunches 30s of squats and another 30s of push-ups to finish off the session.

Stefano you did great and it was a pleasure having you join us!