It's our Birthday!

To celebrate GoodGym Oxford being 6 years old a bevy of GoodGymers got together at County Hall. Of course we had to include a Good Deed in our birthday celebrations (no Wednesday is complete without one), so we packaged up 3 boxes of old trainers to send to JogOn for repurposing and recycling. These had been collected up from friends, family and colleagues over the previous few weeks, saving them from going to landfill.

With 26 GoodGymers in attendance that task was complete in record time, leaving us the rest of the evening to chat over drinks and nibbles, reminiscing about the past 6 years and speculating about what the future might bring.

Our 6 year Good Deed count is 8038. Happy Birthday to Us!

The task: finishing painting the walls at Oxsrad.
The complication: all the blue paint had dried up, and the white paint had been speckled with blue, making it a delightful pale sky blue.
The next step: stand around eating birthday cake for Vicky's birthday while we see if there's a solution.
The solution: give up on the idea of painting, layer up, and go and do a litter pick instead.

Thank you everyone for being adaptable!

with Goodgym Reading launching recently, we thought that February would be the perfect time for a trip to Prospect parkrun. Little did we know that February would mean very boggy conditions!

Prospect parkrun is a lovely course - two laps around the park, with a couple of small slopes and quite a few puddles to dodge. We admired the array of ancient trees along the route as well.

Everyone managed to stay upright in the mud and Poppy dog even managed a sub-30 time as part of her couch-to-5k training!

It was fab to link up with some of our Reading counterparts and hand out some flyers to the other runners, Ellie was a one woman cheerleader for Goodgym!

After running and marketing we headed to the very lovely cafe for the all important coffee and pastries and discussed ither parkruns that we'd like to visit this year! Keep your eyes peeled for more parkrun tourism in the near future.

A couple of weeks ago we spent our evening running and walking around Oxford pinning up posters recruiting letter writers for 'From Me to You' - a charity focused on reducing loneliness in people receiving treatment for cancer. This week we decided to try writing our own letters.

Reading through the tips and guidance on how to approach writing our letters, we quickly put pen to paper, ending up with a beautifully eclectic mix of missives. Creativity shone through with poems and games included, plus anecdotes about daily life etc. It was really interesting to consider what to write to a total stranger, and easier than we thought it would be once you start.

Find out more about writing your own letters here.

Happy Birthday Bethan. Thank you for baking a lovely cake Alice.

On Wednesday we rounded off a January full of Good Deeds with a litter pick in Headington. In an exciting development we were joined by a journalist from ITV, who was filming a piece on GoodGym which will show on the 6pm news in a few weeks' time. So, alongside our expert litter picking, this week we got to polish our public speaking/acting skills. Cue some 'fake' running (there was real running too!), performative litter picking, and expert handling of hecklers while being interviewed by Ben.

Filming complete, we picked up the pace on our litter picking and made sure we'd done a thorough clean up of Gipsy Lane before we had to call time on the session.

Welcome to GoodGym Stephen!