This week was a return to the St. Anne's Community Garden where three tonnes of topsoil awaited us. With several buckets, a wheelbarrow and an improvised recycling box on a trolley, we shoveled, lugged, and tipped in record time, shifting dirt faster than ever, and we've shifted quite a bit in the past!

With all that done in record time thanks to a great turnout and committed team, it meant that Sam has completed his 100th task! So we all headed back down the hill for stretches and cupcakes kindly made by Ruth!

This week we returned to St. Anne's Community Garden where the beds needed preparing for a new growing season and before the delivery of fresh compost next week.

One of the beds had an old concrete fence post hole in it which needs to be removed. It was a sturdy old lump though and despite upgrading from a mallet and chisel to a full-on sledge hammer, we only managed to chip some bits off the sides.

As well as all that we shuttled in some pine logs from a nearby neighbour's garden to create nice edging around the border of the garden!

A team of five assembled before tackling the steep hill of Crawley Green Road (11% incline over 400m!). Calves truly tested we arrived at St. Anne's Community Garden where two tons of topsoil greeted us.

Our task for this session was to shift the soil into raised beds that a school trip had made earlier in the day.

With the dirt diligently distributed, we said adios to the volunteers and headed to a nearby park where we did a session of sprint intervals to get our hearts properly pumping, followed a quick recovery lap and a nice hamstring stretch before running rapidly back down the hill.

A super seven runners came together to tackle this evening's task, but first we had to get there which was literally an uphill struggle!🏃🏽🏃🏼‍♀️🏃🏻‍♂️🏃🏻‍♀️

70m of altitude were gained in the short run to our task, most of which in one dreaded 11% incline hill. Certainly a challenge for the legs!🥵

Arriving at our turf-stripping task for the St. Anne's Community Gardeners we discovered that dry, hard ground is very hard to work with, but once we broke into the surface we managed to start teasing the turf away.⛏️ It was definitely a full body workout as the turf vigorously resisted our attacks and had to be wrestled away.

Eventually, what initially seemed like an impossible task started to look manageable and our gang of gung-ho GoodGymmers committed to completing the two plots we'd been assigned and with arms and legs and backs all tiring, a final push got the job done, mission accomplished!

We then jogged round to a nearby park for a good deep stretch of our legs and backs to keep the aches away in the morning, and then made our fully downhill way home, much appreciated for weary bodies! We'll all sleep well after that! 😴

Three GoodGymmers joined forces with the local residents to get this new community project started. clearing up the growing area of overhanging trees and shrubs was the order of the day and we made a fine pile of cuttings! Cleaning up the entrance to make it more welcoming also helped start this transformation.

Supporting the launch of the new Eaton Valley Community Garden, our keen GoodGym team went on the run to deliver invitations to the neighbours to get involved and join the launch event.

90 invitations delivered by 6 runners in just 10 mins left plenty of time for a few hill reps in the park, a run to another park and a good stretch session before we headed back into town.