What’s happened to the weather on Tuesdays?! For months and months we’ve enjoyed dry Tuesday evenings until late last year when our luck ran out and since then we’ve had various combinations of wet, windy & freezing!

Still it doesn’t put you lovely people off, still you come to get fit and do good! Tonight we returned to Hove Prom to help clear the stranded stones so that parkrun and other prom users can run, walk and promenade unencumbered by those pesky pebbles.

Most of the course has now been cleared by sweeping sensations Glenn & David and Glenn met us at the parkrun beach hut to arm us with shovels, brooms & buckets. We focussed on the remaining stones at the far end of the course and with the noise of scraping, shovelling and sweeping ringing in our ears we cleared another section to help Glenn and David on their mission to make parkrun stone free!

Time for a quick Tabata of press ups and burpees at the i360 on the way back to base before you were ably led home by Helena & Michael as I had a resident’s community meeting to attend as a representative of Goodgym. On the agenda were measures to tackle graffiti and our role in this was gratefully acknowledged. It was agreed that reacting quickly to unwanted graffiti was the most effective way of reducing it and Goodgym have been instrumental in helping achieve this. Great stuff!

Just a reminder that its our parkrun meet up at Hove Park this Saturday and next week we are off to the Walrus pub for our monthly social . Let us know if you are coming to these here and here.

On a freezing damp Tuesday evening 14 intrepid Goodgymers braved the elements to help clean the soggy streets of Hanover. After an enthusiastic warm up led by Helena (too cold to stay still), we ran down to the Alms Houses at the foot of Elm Grove and met with Councillor David Gibson for a spot of competitive clean up.

Armed with plastic bags and litter pickers, 4 of the group took on the jungle like gardens in front of the Alms Houses, the rest of the group split into teams of two and raced up the streets of Hanover to see who could fill their bags with the most rubbish and recycling in 20 mins, with the strict instruction that raiding kerb recycling boxes was cheating and would result in instant disqualification…as if we would!

We soon returned with bags bulging with detritus (including a couple of unopened bottles of beer!) and disposed of it in the recycling bins, it was pretty much neck and neck across the teams in terms of how much collected, about 15 bags in all. Everyone's a rubbish winner.

Task complete we headed over to the playground to get some fitness done. However as Tara started to brief us on the exercises we were joined by some rather inebriated chaps who despite Tara’s very diplomatic discouragement were inclined to be a drunken nuisance.

Not to be discouraged we headed to Victoria Gardens and got to work on squats, toe taps, lunges and sprints. Everyone worked hard and managed to stay upright despite the muddy conditions and we headed back to base happy, sweaty and breathless.

Back at YHA a squall of rain passed and the moon rose over Kemp Town as we did our final stretches. We grabbed our bags, said our good byes and headed off into the night, glad to know we’d done our bit to clean the not-so-mean streets of Brighton.

We began tonight’s session by welcoming a new runner (hi Alice!), as well as a number of second timers and veteran GoodGym-ers alike. If this evening was any indicator of the year to come, we can look forward to having many hands on deck for our community tasks of 2019! After Michael gave tonight’s intro talk and we congratulated Martin for a spectacular PB at Saturday’s GoodGym Parkrun, all 18 of us did a quick warmup around the fountain and headed three kilometres back to the prom to once again wage battle against pebbles.

Wielding brushes, shovels and buckets, we swept, scooped, hauled and dumped those cheeky pebbles back onto the beach where they belong, and managed to make some pretty decent p-rock-ress (pardon the pun). Walkers, runners, cyclists, and general revellers of Hove prom can now enjoy an additional 20 or so meters of smooth pavement! With winter still in full swing however, we can probably expect some rough seas ahead yet, and fresh deluges of pebbles upon the prom. But no matter, for we are always up to the task and enjoy the challenge!

Because that wasn’t tough enough, Tara and Michael facilitated some tabata sessions for us in the grass (luckily no dog poo) involving planks, jump squats, press-ups and everybody’s favourite, burpees. Feeling slightly Swedish, we then did some fartlek running back to base, using the lampposts along the prom to mark our intervals between sprints and recovery running. A good stretch and goodnights all around will take us to next week. Thanks for the ‘fantastic sweeps’ and hope to see you all then!

And we’re back in the game!

After what seemed like ages since out last run but was in fact only 3 weeks we gathered once more to Get Fit and Do Good Brighton style.

We welcomed a fantastic four new runners having their first Goodgym experience….Paula, Angela, Katharine & Nat, it’s great to have you on board. And a big welcome also to Lisa, a seasoned London Goodgymmer, joining us whilst working down south.

In the news….

January Challenge is go. The aim is to do as many good deeds and run as many kms as we can in January. So please get all your runs on Strava and linked to the Goodgym website so we can smash our target.

You can add kms and deeds by park running with us at Hove Prom on Saturday morning at our monthly meet up and then coming along to Sloane Court to complete a good deed at our extra January weekend group run. This is helping out in the garden at a council run seniors accommodation so a great fit for Goodgym.

Tonight’s task was a regular for us, cleaning a community kitchen which uses all its profits from commercial cookery classes and events to fund work with community groups to help them learn about food. There are some fantastic courses coming up to extend your culinary repertoire, check them out here and at Goodgym we get a discount by using code GOODGYM618 valid until the end of March 2019.

Jo & Evie from the food partnership set us to work on cleaning the windows, paying particular attention to the sticky tape left behind from the Christmas decorations, and wiping down surfaces and cupboards to clear off sticky fingermarks. After 20 minutes or so of hard work, all was clean and we headed off to the seafront for our fitness session.

Meanwhile….over to Helena who led a sub group on a Christmas tree hunt….

Nine of the Brighton Goodgymers took on the seafront, and LOTS of New Year joggers, to run towards Hove and round up the discarded Christmas trees that didn't quite make to collection points..

Splitting into pairs and threes we covered much of the Palmeira area, working our arms, shifting at least 20 HUGE trees. A special mention for Sherman who dragged 2 trees taller than himself across half of Hove! These trees will now get made in to compost insead of going to landfill and have made the neighbourhood much tidier. Smelling distinctly of pine, we all headed back to meet the rest of the Brighton Goodgymers for our fitness session.

Reunited as one big group we took on the fitness challenge of five rounds of mountain climbers, sit ups and squats, decreasing from 25 reps of each down to 5 for the last round. But once somebody had completed all the reps of one exercise everybody could move on to the next one. Special thanks to Damien for smashing out those mountain climbers!

It felt like the first but was indeed the second Tuesday of the month which means monthly social time, so we headed to the Black Lion for some drinks and pub grub, where some of the group were delighted, and the rest of us were disappointed not, to be asked for their ID!! All that getting fit and doing good is obviously keeping some of us looking young!

So hope to see some of you at the extra run this weekend, or next week we’ll be back at the prom sweeping the last of he pebbles to clear the course for parkrun.

Keep on running!