It was great to have so many people join us for the first time tonight: welcome to Jenny, Oliver, Mitch, Richard, Jo and Isabel! We got warmed up, marvelled at the fact that 11% of the runners here tonight were called Richard, then split up into our respective groups.

Mel led a walk and chat litter-picking group on a couple of kilometre tour around the local area. It was a well-planned route as, even though right in the centre of town, the group found loads of rubbish and hauled a load of bags to a pick-up point for Bristol Waste. Despite being busy litter-bees, they still had time to take some power stance litter-picking photos. All in a night's work!

The Black Arrows

Meanwhile, the rest of us set off towards St Werburghs, led by our very own acrobatic running crew, The Black Arrows, who stunned us with performances of running in squares, arrows and straight lines. The talent really never ends here at GoodGym Bristol. We soon arrived at our two neighbouring tasks for the evening, St Werburgh's City Farm Community Garden and Narroways. The charities had even had a chinwag before we arrived to work out how many of us each of them needed!

The Tree Musketeers

Seven GoodGymers headed off with Chris from Narroways to the nature reserve to do some cutting back of the overgrown areas. This involved lots of bramble cutting, hacking at long grass and weeds (which Richard got scarily into), cutting back overgrown trees and bushes and trying to remove ash saplings. Chris offered a prize for anyone who could do this (I embarrassed myself having a go and not moving it in the slightest) - top tip, remove your saplings when they are tiny!

Meanwhile the rest of the group were split into seven teams in the Community Gardens. Half of the teams were allocated an area of the gardens to tackle the bindweed which has spread across the whole area during the hot summer. The other teams were set to work to remove a tree which had fallen onto the path, stopping it from being accessible and doing compost heap runs. Liam had a blissful half hour peacefully watering the vegetables and Chris and Richard got the hard job with turning compost at the farm.

Living on barrow-ed time

The time went too quickly and we had to drag people away from their bindweed to run home. The team from the gardens were really pleased what our 'team of locusts' had got done, and we wished them farewell for the last of our light evenings at the gardens this year.

We headed back and did a lunge stop. After 5 minutes and legs beginning to burn, we got the group back together and headed back to Queen Square for a much-needed stretch off.

The sun was shining for our special event in Bristol today as we partnered with I Am Team GB for the Nations Biggest Sports day!

Welcome and congratulations to the many of you who braved the heat and the long run for their very first GoodGym session. Give a huge cheer to Caroline, Katherine, Cathryn, Hannah, Matthew, Anna, Sam, Nadia, Louise, Nora, Abby, Caroline and Emma ! It was also so great to see some lovely GoodGym tourism, with runners from Cardiff, Bath, Hounslow and even as far as York visiting for the day!

At GoodGym there are three main ways we do good – group runs, which happen in Bristol every Tuesday at 6:30 from the gym we met at today, coach runs, where an individual runner visits an elderly or isolated person every week, and missions, where two or more runners will go on a one-off visit to do a job at an elderly person’s house. It all started almost 10 years ago with one man, our founder Ivo, running to deliver a paper to an older gentleman, and now we’re in over 50 locations across the UK..it’s the best way to get fit and do good going!

The idea behind today’s special I am Team GB event is to get people more active and take part in local sporting and community activities and we had the honour of being joined at the run by GB superstar and skeleton pro Jack Thomas. What a treat! Dreams were later made real when we had the once in a lifetime chance (for most of us!) to be presented a medal by a member of our Olympic team. Oooh!

After lots of photos we did a warm up which got our heart rates up, and had a quick poll to determine which was our favourite biscuit. Well, the results are in, and the survey says: custard creams by a landslide! But the discussion continued into our run as we debated whether jaffa cakes were indeed a biscuit or a cake – the eternal conundrum.

Nice and hot Nissen Hut

Our task today was to support the Friends of Eastville Park, and after a very hot and sweaty 5km, we arrived at the park and faced the big old hill at the end of the run. Luckily there was cordial and ice cubes waiting for us and we cooled off in the beautiful WW2 Nissen Hut while organiser Andrew told us about the various jobs we had to do.

While the first group headed off to the gorgeous old (and unfortunately empty) Victorian swimming pool to help spruce it up, pulling up weeds and clearing rubbish, the second group tackled the graffiti at the loos, while the third lot worked on the pesky dock leaves outside the hut. It was hot work, but nothing could stop the 36 of of you who worked hard for 30 minutes. Luckily there was a tasty reward in the shape of some vanilla ice cream, so after a sweet cool down, we headed down to the shady bottom part of the park for a sort fitness session.

In honour of the Nation’s Biggest Sports Day, we went back to our youth and did a themed session which started off with a quick warm up (with forfeits!) and included a relay featuring skipping, sack race jumps, a three legged race and even wheelbarrows. Perhaps it was no surprise that the team with the GB athlete ran away with the win, but it was close!

We took the second half of the run at a steady pace, and regrouped near the end to finish all together – all with the backdrop of some very good smelling BBQs and tunes from the local jazz festival to see us in!

We finished off the session with some stretches and a medal ceremony with Jack handing out the well-earned prizes. Even our doggo mascot for the day got one! There was also the ceremonial handing over of the Golden Trowel from Bristol to York, the current winners who take the crown for doing the most good deeds in January. As you can see from the photos Bristol wasn’t totally ready to give up their trophy!

Fantastic work today everybody. We got loads done for a community organisation that relies on volunteers to keep a much loved public space open and welcoming, and we even smashed a good 10km run in the process. Happy National Sports Day gang!