It was great to have lots of new faces join us for the final Tuesday Group Run of January: welcome to Richard, Harriet, Isabelle, Pawel, Sara Sona! And welcome to Frankie joining us from GoodGym Hackney for the next few weeks!

We tested everyone's brain power with a game of Shona Says (back by popular demand). Everyone's brains were ticking pretty nicely and there was only a few forfeit sprints. We split the group into three to complete our tasks for the evening:

1. Donation sorting at the British Heart Foundation
2. Tree pulling for Up Our Street
3. Painting at Redcliffe Nursery

Skirting the issue

Richard led a team of 10 to British Heart Foundation to help with donation sorting. Divided between sorting donations, tagging them and getting a new found love of steaming, the group got through loads of donations and found some hot new outfit items for their wardrobes (see photo evidence).

No beating about the bush

Meanwhile, Gary led a group to The Dings to help Up Our Street in their garden beds their. The team were surprised at the task of all of them removing a bush in the middle of the bed. Surely it wouldn't take them all to do that? But half an hour of them rotating and shovelling later and the group got the satisfaction of getting the whole thing out - well done gardening team!

Painting the town Redcliffe

The rest of us headed to Redcliffe Nursery with Mel leading a walking group there. Once we had all convened (with some detours), we got inside and split between painting the corridors and offices, moving all of the pebbles back into the pebble pit, sweeping and litter-picking the garden and doing the Squat & Lunge 200 Challenge. After half an hour of rotating around the different jobs, the nursery had a new feature wall in their office, a tidy playground and a coat of paint on the entrance to their hall and we had sore thighs and bums and surprisingly un-paint covered clothes. We will be back again soon to continue the job!

Once we were all back from our different corners of Bristol, we were able to celebrate the wonderful Alex hitting 200 (and 14) Good Deeds - she hit the big 2-0-0 a couple of weeks ago but this was her first Tuesday run to be presented with her t-shirt. In the meantime, she has managed to rack up 7% more deeds than what was being celebrated, wow.

Good-deeded and celebrated, that was it for another night of GoodGym Bristol and the last of the January challenge Group Runs!

Pun credit to Gazza

It was a chilly one for us tonight but it didn't stop the droves of GoodGymers once again coming out to do as much good as they could on this January eve. It was great to have Naomi and Ashleigh join us for the first time tonight - we hope to see you again soon!

We tried to master our brain and body warm-up again with different moves for each number... slightly better than last week, still a lot of brain warming up required. Once we were warm, we split into two groups. Alice was leading a smaller group to The Matthew Tree Project. We did our main session of helping them earlier in the month, but as they still have loads of donations to sort through following the generosity of people in the run up to Christmas, they asked if the group could come back for another session. Off down the cycle path they went, and they had a jolly half an hour of sorting as many tins as they could, much to Amy from TMTP's delight.

Abs-olutely amazing

The rest of the group headed to St Paul's Adventure Playground, where we met Guy, Rachel and 6-month old Rosa, who introduced us to the evening's tasks. There was leaf sweeping and litter-picking to be done, so the group were armed with brushes and litter-pickers and got to work making it clear for the local children again, getting an ab workout at the same time with their brooming. Another group were tasked with moving wood chip from one location to make a soft landing for the new rope swing. And a final group were screwdriver-ing between the planks on the play structure to remove leaves and make it stronger and last longer. It's no visit to a playground without a cheeky play, so we set off on a GoodGym chain down the steepest slide in the world (or maybe the steepest in St Paul's, Bristol...)

Once we were back in Queen Square, there was time for tonight's fitness session. Although some people may have played an alcohol-based game to Roxanne before, it was time for something much more fun. Once the group were sick of the name Roxanne and could burpee no more, we stretched off, before celebrating Julie's achievement of reaching 100 Good Deeds last week with the now-traditional Centurion Gallop. Well done Julie! We got to celebrate with some delicious flapjacks and brownies from Julie, then head on our way.

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