The Sun Streak continued for week 4 of GoodGym Newcastle

The sun shone on a massive group of Geordie GoodGymers on their visit to Brims House, a home for veterans in our community with Changing Lives Newcastle

In a slight bit of route trickery by Paul we made our way up Westgate Road in a slightly less uphill direction, chatting as we went and making sure all 9 yes NINE of our new runners were made to feel part of the family.

We were met by the lovely Alice and Stuart at Brims House and after a quick registration and brief we were set to work. Two garden tasks including mowing a lawn by hand, painting (yes this is possible) and a discovery of potatoes by David while an indoor team did a kitchen spruce-up and a deep clean in the living room. Precious also did a grand job of the windows which I'm not even sure was on the list! No wonder they want us back! Stuart thanked us and admitted he didn't think we would do such an amazing job in just 30 minutes!

Off downhill we went with the promise that this week the fitness spot prize was up for the taking. A huge game of dishes and domes began with 80% of people saying they weren't that competitive.

they lied

Team 4 were victorious and we celebrated by wearing the hats as cones before awarding Chance with the fitness prize, the coveted Drumstick Lolly for services to cone tactics in the competition. The envy of everyone on the way back, I'm sure you'll agree.

Great work everyone! See you next week for the Canny Quayside Clear up with Sustrans NE, and all-important bank holiday drinks afterwards.

17 runners ran 5km to pick up litter along the Bristol Bath Cycle Path

Wooo what an awesome and fantastic time we had! We all met at the Vivo Sports centre at 6.20pm. We had many regular GoodGym runners join us, even those who ran Riga on the weekend... epic effort Debs!

The session started with the traditional Good ol' GoodGym introduction from Ben, the GoodGym Cardiff trainer (GoodGym Cardiff launches next Tuesday! Good luck Ben!!). It was great to have him join us one more time before the launch. He kicked off the session reminding everyone about staying safe whilst we run Important! , explaining the task for the evening Exciting! and then led the warm up session for the evening Exhilarating

After opening the gates, ushering the chickens into the coup and then closing the gates (our routine Bristol warm up exercises), and jogging on the spot at changing speeds, we set off! Zooooommmm.

We ran 2.5km to the Bristol Bath cycle path - BIKE!!! - where we spent 25 minutes collecting as much litter as we could - BIKE!! -. 8 bags of litter to be exact!! LITTERally everyone put the hard work in and we made the landscape look beautiful once again! One GoodGymmer also found a kettle!! - What a rubbish find! ( a good rubbish find ... if you get me... :D ) Unfortunately it didn't work... so we had to miss out on a cuppa this time.

Our route back took us over the swingy bridge and then over the squiggly bridge...(Check out the photos!! It was our first time on this bridge and now there's photo evidence!). With 10 minutes to spare we stopped off to do some core body circuit drills! We did some tricep dips and planks to press-ups! Wohhhh we broke a sweat! To help us stay motivated we reminded ourselves of the mantra... "A strong core is essential for a good running form!"

We then finished with a full body stretch and headed back to the meeting point. Some of us stayed awards for a well earned cuppa! Mmmmmm :) BIKE!!!! ... (oh, a bike isn't coming, my bad!)

Thanks everyone for an awesome run! See you this Saturday or next Tuesday at our next group runs!

If you've not come to a GoodGym Bristol group run before you can find out about our next runs by clicking here.

Tuesday’s spring-blessed run saw 31 GoodGymmer’s head back to Emmaus (pronounced Em-May-Us!) in Stokes Croft for a bit of lifting and shifting in their enormous furniture warehouse.

Emmaus provides both work and a home for 23 people who were previously homeless. Emmaus’ story is a fascinating one, and we were given a brief history of how they were founded as well as their aims and principles by Xanne when we arrived. If you’ve got a few minutes, you can find out more about their history on the Emmaus website.

Emmaus is a social enterprise and one of their sources of income is selling furniture and other household items that are donated by the public. Their warehouse is crammed to the rafters full of goodies and what they needed was some willing labour to shift things about and help create some Emmaus’ing space.

Any ideas we had of admiring what was in stock were quickly shelved as we embraced our first logistical challenge. With teamwork and brute force, we first cleared some industrial shelving units of their groaning mass, before dismantling them and moving them to another part of the warehouse. Emmaus had set aside a week for just one guy to do the job, we managed to do it in 30 minutes! The rest of the team also took to sorting brick-a-brac and books lifting more pages like an over-excited Harry Potter fanatical octopus in possession of a new JK Rowling novel in an active wind tunnel.

After re-assembling the shelves and making sure they were re-stacked, we took stock of our achievement and we were thanked for a good night’s work.

We then headed off to Queen Square where Gary took us through the usual array of fitness stuff, before deciding then to replenish ourselves with a cool drink. So then, as Shelvis Presley would say, thank you very much!

Thanks to Darren for writing the report and Alice for the pun. Hope you don't mind my little octopus addition, can't miss an opportunity for a simile.

What a night! Our biggest group of the year helped the Julian Trust to prepare their night shelter for the homeless and smashed some Fartlek training in the process.

With a humongous group of runners including a metric ton of newbies we all met and warmed up at Vivo. The run was short but our enthusiasm was not. We tackled the 1 mile run their like it was nothing and met our host Richard at the shelter in St Pauls.

5 nights a week the shelter offers 18 people a bed for the night, some food and washing facilities. They have no prejudice of who can come they just offer the places on a first-come-first-served basis.

Our job for the evening was to help Richard and the team to prep the shelter for tonight's guests. Richard took us through our tasks and then we split into teams to tackle the jobs. We had bed linen changers, laundry room attendants, floor moppers, bread butterers, table wipers and a big group of litter pickers to tidy up the outside area, especially a patch around the back where some fly-tipping had taken place.

A few highlights were -

• Emma and Charlie were keener than an over-excited puppy covered in mustard waiting for his first walk of the day to get their hands on the bread and butter. 4 loaves were some prepared with precision spreading.

• Jenny and Elly's completely baffled faces trying to work a dryer then realising they needed to switch it on at the wall.

• Mel getting incredibly into unblocking a storm drain in the yard.

• Sarah and her one-lady mission to clear the bushes of litter.

• Nick's domestic pride when it came to mopping the floor (sorry about the footprints at the end!)

That was not even the half of it. Everyone put in a good shift and Richard was really chuffed with our efforts. So after saying goodbye and running back I still had time to fit in some great running fitness training in the form of Fartleks around Queen Square.

We stretched and chatted before congratulating some milestones. Massive well done to Jon and Emily for hitting 50, welcome to the black t-shirt gang. Another big lump of red t-shirt respect goes out to our very own Paul Becker also for completing his 200th run on Saturday for which we bestowed him with the pink panther wheelbarrow custom 200 t-shirt. To celebrate we headed off to Atomic Diner and ate, sang and were merry.

Thanks to everyone who made it along tonight, especially those who came out for your first run with us, it was a marvelous effort.

See you next time,

Gary

This was no April Shower as 16 sunny souls ran 3 km to Redcliffe to help Growing Support at their Spring Open Event with Redcliffe Gardening Club

IT'S OFFICIAL!! - GoodGym Bristol loves Saturday mornings and Saturday mornings love us back!!

It was fabulous to see a splattering of red at Ashton Court first thing today, turning up to find Hannah, Anthony, Dom and Bisa all getting ready to start their day by heading up the hill at parkrun and great to run across from there with Dom to join the GoodGym Saturday gang at Roll For The Soul for another fun filled jaunt to do some good in the local community.

It was a short run today, an ideal starter session, and we warmly welcomed newcomers, Robert and Martha (who had run once before with GG Camden), to the group for the start of our run to Somerset Square in Redcliffe, where we were met by Amy, from Growing Support, an award winning social enterprise tackling loneliness, social isolation and inactivity. running weekly gardening clubs, where older people are enabled to work together in the garden, grow their own food and connect with nature.

They were hosting the Redcliffe Gardening Group's Open Event and it was great to see the local community getting involved and enjoying the fabulous surroundings.

Amy passed us over to Kia and Marky, who ran through the tasks that we would be carrying out and in true GoodGym fashion our team organised themselves into four groups of four and got stuck into their respective tasks:

Paul B, Alice, Yiyin and Yuting headed off with a wheelbarrow to move stone chippings from one part of the estate over to the garden.

Paul R, Charlene, Julia and Nicole got busy with spades and forks moving and turning over compost in a tight area that required a great deal of synchronisation.

Deb, Maddy, Dom and Ellie were busy digging at the top end of the garden preparing the ground and then planting blackcurrant, whitecurrant and raspberry bushes.

David, Martha, Robert and myself were down at the bottom end of the garden digging and turning over the soil which Kia could then sieve to remove some of the embedded stone.

In amongst all the digging there was quite a lot of bricks being found, apparently from the old Georgian properties that had originally been there before the area had been turned into flats - there were also stories of dead bodies but thankfully we didn't find any!

This was a really nice morning and lovely to spend some time with people living in the neighbourhood who had visited the garden to relax, walk their dog or just to see what was going on. There was a real feeling of togetherness.

After our work was done, we enjoyed tea, coffee, juice, cakes and biscuits before a quick Heavy Metal Red Thunder photo shoot!

We were then heading back on our short journey for a stretch out and lunch at Roll For The Soul, where we congratulated Paul B on reaching his 200th GoodGym deed - a fantastic achievement by an absolute GoodGym legend and all round ace bloke! Thanks also for backmarking today Paul.

Well done to Maddy, who got of the mark with her first and today's pun!

And to Julia, who headed straight off after then run to help Surfers Against Sewage with a litter pick, which is actually what we will be doing next Saturday morning!

Thanks to everyone for coming today, it was great to see you all and a great job all round!

There are two more runs this week on Tuesday evening and Saturday and our monthly social with food and drink (and a few milestones to celebrate) after the run on Tuesday, so check all those out and hope to see you at some or all of those.

Cheers

Dave