A swashbuckling report inspired by the array of fencing paraphernalia we found last night ...

On an evening like this with the moon sitting majestically in the sky as it was, magic can happen.

“Emmaus, Emmaus!!!” was the chant as our adventurers gathered, as if channeling the energy of the almighty Calippo to look over us on our journey into the summer heat. We welcomed new and old and set off on the short gallop to fulfil our destiny.

Xanne, our Dungeon Master told us of our quest, the treasure that awaited us and the dangers we may face. “How about this?” was a cry so often heard this evening. But we needed to focus, there be dragons in these parts and they like to hoard. We must keep ahead of them. Luckily we had our two guards out front to protect us.

After what seemed like no time we had revealed the Boots of Squishyness, many Gauntlets of Ooh! and a lot of memories were unearthed and made. We were done. All that was left was to make our way into the night and tell tales of our deeds over a drink. Until next time.

D.I.S.M.I.S.S.

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.

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).