It was an awesome morning at Southampton Parkrun. The GoodGym Portsmouth crew came along to help their Southampton neighbours to promote GoodGym. And what a day to pick - Southampton Parkrun were celebrating their 500th event so lots of parkrunners attended - 1056 to be precise!

The RD gave us a big shout at the start and we held our GoodGym banner for all to see. We then all dispersed to either run, volunteer or hold the banner and give out leaflets - this worked a treat as it meant everwhere you looked you saw a GoodGym t-shirt!

Sinead, Katie, Lauren, Abby, Helen, Dave and Dave were parkrunners. Alice did an awesome job of holding down the banner and handing out leaflets. Jen was on token scanning. Tracey managed the funnel. Dave was parkwalker. Katie was token sorter - who had a bit of a shock when she realized the number of tokens that would need sorting. Val and Wilson were banner holders. Judy litterpicked. Lauren gave out leaflets as she ran. Ellie was tailwalker and photographer - getting some pukka shots and video.

It was a lovely surprise to see two new GoodGymers join us, both called Dave - making it a hat trick of Dave's! They did an awesome job of chatting to runners and handing out leaflets after the run.

The morning had a real good vibe about it, lets hope we see some new faces at our next GoodGym task.

Team work makes the dreamwork - Thankyou Portsmouth GoodGym for coming up to support us, you doubled our presence. Thankyou Southampton Parkrun for making us feel so welcome and promoting us on your facebook page and awesome effort Southampton Goodgym - we got this!

Thanks to Katie for todays pun.

It’s a Saturday morning, Parkrun day and also one of our regular meet ups with Southsea Beachwatch for the monthly beach clean. It was also the first of 2 community missions that Goodgym Portsmouth were doing today.

Several of us took part at the Parkrun prior to the beach clean to ensure that we were all warmed up and ready for the stretching, lunging and reaching that we would be doing with our pickers later. The beach clean this month started West of Southsea Pier and it was great to be joined by our parkrun runners as well as Jen who arrived speedily with her daughter in pushchair. Welcome and hello also to David and David who joined us today on their first Community Mission.

With grabbers and bags in hand we took our customary group photo, (plastic bag mishap in zip from Louisa) and we ventured off towards the pier as that is where most of the rubbish gets accumulated. On the way, we found the usual assortment of bottle tops, pen tops, cigarette butts and plastic wrappers. People split into their own groups and some tackled the rubbish to the West of the pier and some headed towards the Eastney side of the beach.

Angela and Rachel headed towards the pier where they collected an assortment of metal which had been left when the pier was repaired along with a single sock. Katie, Louisa, Maura and Jo remained near the pier collecting an assortment of bottle tops, fishing lines, plastic netting and Jo ventured under the pier to attempt to retrieve the hard to reach litter. Tracey, Judy and Mel headed towards Eastney over the other side of the pier to collect more rubbish from that side of the beach. Jen started her daughter early with the Goodgym spirit and did an excellent job of collecting rubbish near the shore line putting everything they found into a bucket before emptying it out into a bag.

As Tracy quoted at the end

We may not have collected much, but altogether it’s a lot’.

The next beach clean will be on 13 April where we will coincide our Parkrun meetup too