I don’t know about you but I found that hill tough tonight so apologies for not easing you back in gently and making you tackle one of Brighton’s biggest hills on the first run back of the year! IT strangely felt up hill in both directions too!

But before the run we had lots of Christmas and New year park run progress to catch up on. Congratulations to Roy for finally smashing his target of getting under 21 minutes at both Hove Prom and Hove Park and to Rosie who also took a big chunk off of her PB at the Prom. And well done to Katherine who finally discovered the joy of park run and completed her first ever, quickly followed by her second ever! And talking of parkrun its our meet up at East Brighton this Saturday so hope to see a few of you there.

So with much chat about how we’d all enjoyed the festive season we headed up the massive hill to Cardinal Newman school, picking up Benita, Emma & Tabitha on the way. Premises Manager Pedro set us to work on cleaning the hard to reach parts of a large staircase, concentrating on the dusty railings, high level cobwebs and dust and scuff marks on the walls. With 15 of you working hard we got the job done in about 20 minutes leaving time for a quick fitness session of plank variations in the school corridor. The variations were all designed to target your glutes as well as your core, so great exercises to do to strengthen and condition yourselves for running!

And with all the excitement of the first one back I forgot to mention the January challenge to see which Goodgym area can do the most good deeds and run the most kilometres. Distance ran will be only include those runs logged onto Strava so if you’re not using it then now would be a good time to start! For those that don’t know about Strava its an app that records all your runs and a great way of documenting your activity and process and you can follow your friends to see what activities they are doing as well.

See you next week for a lovely flat run to George Street to help in a charity shop. It’s another longer run at 6km but I’m hoping to have an alternative run and task delivering newlestters for Extinction Rebellion if you don’t want to run so far, so watch this space! And its our weekly social next week too.

The big news tonight was All About a Roy as he became the latest in a recent spate of runners reaching the magic milestone of a whopping 50 Good Deeds! Oh Roy! What an achievement! And brilliantly timed so you didn’t have to share any of the limelight with any of the other recent entrants to the 50 club! Now If I were a Roy I would probably have offered to write this run report myself so I could big myself up but as he didn’t the task has fallen to me to write an Ode to Roy! The best thing about Roy as far as I’m concerned is if he drinks more than 2 pints at the monthly social you’ve got a pretty good chance of persuading him to write the run report. He’s also thought of a couple of really good puns. Back in his glory days he came up with School Runnings & Back to the Fuscia and I remain hopeful that his recent dry spell will soon be over.

In other news we had 3 new runners joining us for their first run, we were very happy to meet Oz, Joe & Mike. Welcome!

After a 1.5km run to meet Cllrs David & Elaine we split into sub groups to tackle various tasks around the Hanover & Elm Grove ward. Our recent efforts at painting over graffiti have massively reduced its impact in the area and we continued our efforts tonight with Emma & Helena tackling some small new scribbles including a very Badly Drawn Roy and Katharine & David spraying over some junction boxes & bins.

8 other runners including Roy (Roy Division?) took on a bigger area just off the Lewes Road and the pictures show quite a transformation. Great work!

Everybody else worked around the area at the bottom of Elm Grove litter picking and battling the bind weed in front of the Percy Wagner Almshouses and the collective efforts of 20 Brighton Goodgymers has done wonders to keep the neighbourhood looking smart.

The Fitness Session on the Level involved a pack of cards and a game that led to Carly being crowned King of Burpees! We wiill definitely play this game again, perhaps in a slightly different format for no other reason than it opens a whole new pack of card related pun possibilities!

Have a great Bank Holiday folks, see you next Tuesday!

It seems that 50 Goodeeders are like buses that you don’t get one for ages and then you get three come along all at once!

Tonight happy to share the limelight, despite banter to the contrary were Tabatha, Amro & David who all reached the half century milestone on the same week. Congratulations to you all and thank you for your fantastic contribution to the group. Feel Proud! Now the race to 100 begins…

At the other end of the spectrum achieving their first good deed were Emma and Daisy joining us for the first time. We’re very happy to have you! And amongst this weeks sporting achievements were a long bike ride from Helena and valiant efforts from David (& me!) taking part in various events at the Goodgym Olympics. Hopefully next year the clash with Pride will be avoided and we can get a big team up because it really is a cracking day out.

A 2.5km run along the seafront took us to tonight’s destination of Paddock Manor seniors accommodation. Resident Luc (are you sure you’re old enough Luc?!) has done a fantastic job of looking after this hidden gem of a garden but can always do with extra help. So tonight we were set to work on weeding, trimming, digging, planting, compost moving and raking. 16 pairs of hands working for 30 minutes equals an 8 hour working day so Luc was very grateful for our help.

After some debate about the best staircase to take to reach the seafront we hit the spot for tonight’s fitness session. Oh it was tempting to make our trio of 50 goodeeders take on 50 burpees to celebrate their achievement whilst we all watched and encouraged, but instead we played fair, partnered up and did various holding and moving exercises for 50 seconds. I particularly liked (watching!) the surf board get ups, so expect more of those soon!

Don’t forget its our park run meet up on Saturday at Hove Prom and next week will be our social, details of which will be discussed in our WhatsApp group. If you’re not in it and you want to be let me know and I’ll get you in!

See you Saturday!