With Manchester finally thawing out after the cold snap, a few of us met up in St Peter's Square.

Sophie and Peter had already arranged a donation for Don't Walk Past for the Friday evening (11th Jan) outreach to give out sleeping bags and warm clothing for local homeless in the cold weather. Ben managed to provide some hats and gloves nearby this week. We will likely arrange more collections through the year!

On top of the donations, we had more local GoodGymers complete their document check for their DBS, so they are able to carry out nearby missions that get triaged towards GoodGym as a group that can help. It would be great to have more people mission verified to help out with this!

There were also some trainers to be recycled so a JogOn package was prepared to send for refurbishment and reuse, or for shredding and recycling of materials. A great way to help the circular economy of sportswear!

Peter and I completed a loop of the city centre for a nice evening jog.

Happy New Year! Welcome to Niamh who joined us for the first time. It was great to meet you and hope to see you for another GoodGym session soon!

With flooding, snow, ice, and freezing rain threatening around the Greater Manchester area, 3 plucky GoodGymers wrapped up to varying degrees (not sure about Ben wearing shorts...) to pick up any discarded litter in the central Manchester area.

We met outside Manchester Central Library, next to the now unlit giant Santa, before winding our way past Princess St to Chorlton Street before taking on an array of litter on the path between Manchester Piccadilly train station and the O2 Apollo. We managed to fill 5 litter sacks and found a large, broken umbrella to report back to Keep MCR Tidy for collection, before taking a final picture and a questionable selfie.

Christmas cracking turnout today! Great to meet Rhi as well as Christopher again for an efficient clearing up task.

Following various parkrun excursions, we convened on the Fallowfield campus, parking with various degrees of success or coming from Salford by bus, or on foot via the Fallowfield Loop or Didsbury.

Following the Christmas Day meal for recent care leavers, we were tasked with clearing up the entrance hall of decorations and cataloging the leftover gifts and activities ready for next year. We managed to remove any rubbish, recycle leftover cardboard, and bag up any items of food that could be re-purposed.

After just 45 minutes, we were done and dusted (record time apparently) and made our way home. Great to meet other volunteers too, some of whom helped out on the day and it sounded like a good event for the attendees.

Did the course check, pre event set up, and 1st timers briefing at Fletcher Moss parkrun this morning. For one marshal, he got his "dream come true" marshal point at Old Bedians in the furthest corner of the park from the start finish area.

Lots of tourists and 1st timers.

Nearly 300 runners and walkers completed the 5 km course at a muddy Fletcher Moss parkrun event #232 this morning. Gosia and I were on hand go help with the setup before Gosia marshaled at point 7 near the bench. I was funnel manager and photographer for the morning.

Lots of Christmas cheer and excellent outfits for the penultimate event of 2024. Christmas tunes were on hand to welcome runners at the start and through the finish funnel.

City of Trees arranged a bumper day of tree maintenance on the Thursday before Christmas 🎄

With an in-depth health and safety briefing, we donned high viz, hard hats, tough gloves, and goggles to cut away at the hawthorn that had grown up and made it inaccessible to park users.

Over several hours we hacked, cut, trimmed, and sawed our way to make a mountain of piles of wood to compost away over time.

Big thank you to City of trees for organising and for the tea, coffee, and biscuits.