WOOHOO GoodGym Bristol Tuesday night Group Runs are back with a bang for 2020!! We don't do things in halves here at Bristol so we brought in the New Year in style with our new record of 70 runners on a single Group Run! This included 14 lovely first timers - welcome to the gang everyone!

To put all these hands to good use we split into three different tasks...

Sofa Away

Group 1: Emmaus

Richard led a running group and Melanie led a walking group to Emmaus to give our monthly helping hands with sorting their donations in their huge warehouse. On this occasion, it included the newly-founded sport of Sofa Smashing - who knew?

Group 2: The Litter-Pickers

Maria and Alice led the chatty groups and I led the returning (still casual) Greyhounds on our 6km run to and from Lawrence Hill. Alice then did a stellar job of co-ordinating a team of litter-pickers to pick up 5 bags of litter in just 25 minutes from the local area. Definitely a task which needed doing, so thank you Alice and litter-picking dream team!

Group 3: The Matthew Tree Project

Meanwhile, the rest of the group split into A and B to do a 50:50 session helping The Matthew Tree Project with sorting their massive load of donations which they had gathered in the run up to Christmas. As the warehouse was packed, the rest of the group were outside doing The Uptown Funk Dance* and sprint relays.

*may not look good on the dancefloor.

The Fresh Face of Bristol

After sorting a mass of Amy from TMTP's donations and puffing a bit more than previously due to our dancing, we headed back to Queen Square and reunited the groups to play a game of When was Keep On Movin' by Five released. It was a nail-biting one, but Tim eventually stole the prize of the correct answer (1999, in case you were wondering).

We then had the chance to celebrate the wonderful Sarah hitting her 50th Good Deed tonight. Well done Sarah!! We look forward to seeing you sporting your black tee soon!

And that was a wrap! (Well, after we found Alex was looking as fresh-faced as a 17-year-old on tonight's run anyway). We will see you all very soon for more January Challenge Madness!

Pun credit to Gary

We had a last minute change of plan tonight as our planned task couldn't get into the building we were helping in. Never fear, it was the perfect time to finish off leafleting for Penny Brohn's Christmas Concert on 6th December, which we started last week. Mel also stepped up to lead a walking litter-picking group around the local area to clean up the space.

Welcome to Amy, who joined us for the first time tonight - it was great having you!

While Mel's group set-off to litter-pick, the rest of us headed to Hotwells, where we started our zig-zagging long climb up to Clifton (with a lot of back and forth leafleting on the way), with Clo taking some blurry photos to prove just how speedy we were running. Our four teams covered the area and delivered 400 leaflets in no time, as well as having lots of time for wall-sits and partner arms workouts in between.

Merry Crouch-mas

With all of the leaflets safely delivered, we headed on a gratefully-received downhill run back to Queen Square. Here we got to test out our four teams one more time with a hotly contested sprint-into-crouch relay. After that excitement, it was time to cool down, head back into the warm, and wonder where on earth the key is.

It was great to have Lucy and Aisha join us for the first time tonight! It was also lovely to welcome Jack back from his French adventure. We got warmed up (not required in this hot sweaty weather) and split into two groups to head to tonight's two tasks: Children's Scrapstore and helping The Churches Conservation Trust.

Derailed

Half of the group headed to St Paul's Church to help Ed from the Churches Conservation Trust to continue painting the railings of the church. This is a job we started helping the charity with at the start of the summer but have not been able to continue due to rain hampering our efforts. Even in this 32 degree day, a spot of rogue rain was due exactly at GoodGym time. We decided that the railings could cope and got to work on painting the pre-sanded area. The group smashed through it in no time at all and then managed to get to work sanding the entire other side of the railings too.

The railings looked good as new, Ed was extremely impressed and crowned the group as The Most Efficient Railing Painters and we only managed to restyle a few people's hair with Summer 19 Green Streaks - success.

Scrappy-Baggy-Doo

Meanwhile, Gary took his crew over to St Werburgh's for a long-awaited reunion with the Children's Scrapstore. Kelly and her team are preparing for a summer fun day next month and needed 200 Goody Bags prepped for it. Challenge accepted. The group created a chain to fill the goody bags with all sorts of scrap, and under Gary's watchful eye found the most efficient rate of 2-3 bags per person at a time (an efficiency rate challenged by Alice who won the record for Most Bags At One Time Per Person with 6 bags, and gaining the nickname of Alice Whaleback for the queue created behind her) and flew through the bags in just 20 minutes. Easy peasy.

With both group's efficiency, there was time for a 'game' of Sally Up Sally Down back in Queen's Square which everyone was delighted with (and will be even more delighted with tomorrow, I'm sure).

It was great to have Simon, Martha, Miriam and Maria join us for the first time tonight! We treated them with a game of Whoosh to get warmed up (I promise our warm-ups are not normally that mentally challenging) then split into our two groups.

A bunch of us headed off, navigating our way through the Extinction Rebellion protest, to St Werburgh's City Farm Gardens. We met Sarah and Emily who had a whole host of tasks for us to get stuck into. We split into groups and swarmed off around the gardens, weeding all of the paths, cutting back overgrown bushes and trees, removing bindweed from the grounds, watering plants and turning compost. In just 30 minutes, the group did an amazing job of getting all of this manual work done - apparently the compost alone would have taken the team two weeks!

While our trusty clan of barrow-returners went off to the farm, the rest of the group were lucky enough to have a Lunge Off in their two teams. Who knew there was quite such a height difference in the group until this challenge?!

A marrow-thon effort

Meanwhile, Maria led a group up the steep hill to Bramble Hill Farm. They were met by Kim and Adi, our youngest GoodGym helper. They all set to work with various tasks around the farm. This was mainly taking photos of the pigs, but also included lots of weeding, watering of the veg, collecting eggs from the chicken, post-bashing and bindweed removal. Their hard work was rewarded by getting to pick and take home some massive courgettes. Queue the marrow puns...

A marrow escape

They finished all of this just in time to pull themselves away from the hilltop view of a hot air balloon-filled dusky Bristol and make a run for it down the hill, newly equipped with some summer squash. After cooling off and discussing Darren's rocker days over Ross's delicious birthday macaroons (thanks Ross!), the only other key subject on the cards was this week's menu because...

Tomarrow's dinner is courgette to be decided

No pun credit is taken by the author: thank you to Gary, Mel, Clem and Richard.

The morning's torrential rain cleared up for us to have our first non-rainy run in weeks. It was great to have James, Lee, Sam, Briony, Jim, Rachael join us for the first time tonight - we look forward to seeing you again soon!

The group split in half to cover two tasks tonight. Mel tackled her injury to lead a team of 16 to Hannah More Primary School. There, Caretaker Bob provided them with brand new pitchforks to turn all of the bark in the extensive playground. It was a large area but the team managed to cover it all and even had time to practice their monkey skills and unearth some ancient dinosaurs. All in an evening's work.

Crate expectations

Meanwhile, the rest of the group headed for a long-awaited return to East Bristol Foodbank. They had their most recent supermarket collection today with 1.7 tonnes of food. Andy from the food bank had set up the sorting room ready for us when we arrived.

A little less concencrate-ion, a little more action

Most of the group quickly got to sorting all of this food into different categories ready to be made into food parcels. With Chris's efficient technique of a sorting station and food-category runners, the pace of the group increased dramatically and they got through all of the crates set aside for us and more.

All creatures crate and small

Meanwhile, the Hardcore Group set to hoovering and sanitising all of the crates to prevent any unwanted furry visitors to the store. With their efficient work they got through all the crates just in time for our return run.

After a short detour for a Four Minute 🍑 Blast (which everyone will be feeling tomorrow) we got back to Queen's Square to celebrate Chris's completion of his 250th Good Deed - massive well done Chris! We celebrated with the now traditional Vienetta and the cake he brought, which was so unbelievably delicious that we will forgive him for not baking it himself and getting it through some dodgy black-market deals.

Title pun credit to Matt 🦕