After a chance conversation with the vicar at St Mary's Church at Foodie Friday in September, we were invited to assist with fixing some of the tiles on the church floor. ⛪️

Being such an old heritage building, the tiles has become worn and uneven in areas with high foot fall. 🧱

We were tasked with removing the tiles, trying to remove as much of the old, dried motar and then putting these back down with fresh mortar. 🔨

Putting the tiles back down was just like creating a jigsaw! 🧩

This was a new skill for most of us but we were fortunate to be assisted by representatives of the church who could show us the ropes. 🙌

Ben, Hannah and Laura slotted in an extra GoodGym task on a Monday due to a busy diary for GoodGym Stockport in November and December! 🎉

Beginning at Life Leisure Cheadle, we took our usual route to the residential estate we regularly frequent for leaflet drops. 📬

We were delivering leaflets for Together Trust to help promote their Christmas Appeal. 🎄

Together Trust Charity provides life-changing support and care for the children and adults across the Northwest. Their services include specialist educational facilities for young people with autism and learning disabilities, fostering service, residential homes and respite services, sleep clinics and community services. ✨️

Their Christmas Appeal ensures that every person they support receives a gift this winter period, whether it be chocolate, toys, sensory toys, arts and crafts, toiletries, hampers or vouchers. Here is the link for more info: https://www.togethertrust.org.uk/christmas 🎁

City of Trees are a community forest charity for the Greater Manchester area that between October and March every year, organise community tree planting sessions while also carrying out maintenance of their sites. Despite Storm Bert bringing in rain and wind, a group of maybe around 10 or so volunteers local to the area rolled up their sleeves to get planting, including 2 very stubborn Goodgymers Hannah and Ben.

Fueled by tea, coffee, the good biscuits, and endless anecdotes about jaffa cakes, we planted 180 trees in total across the three hour period. This included oak, silver birch, hazel and hawthorn, with some of the smaller shrub-like trees such as hawthorn making up the edge and the larger trees more central. As inspiration, just 20 or so yards away was another area planted 20 years ago by Red Rose Forest (a previous incarnation of City of Trees) and they looked to be doing very well!

The planting required digging a small hole to cover the tree whip roots and filling back in with the tree whip upright, ensuring the upper stem was not submerged at all. We compacted the soil (aka mud) to ensure no air pockets remained before covering with a square of mulch mat held down with bamboo pegs (apparently quite expensive). A major activity was the wheelbarrowing of the pile of woodchip back and forth to cover the mulch mat and mound around the tree whip while not covering the stem, enabling water retention and to prevent surrounding grass or weed growth..

Once all the tree whips were in the ground, successfully surrounded by mulch mat and mulch/woodchip, we said our goodbyes with more rain coming down. With mud caking the volunteers, laundry and a cup of tea was certainly the next port of call.

City of Trees also arrange tree maintenance, something as or if not more important than putting them in the ground in the first place. We will be back to help with maintenance of the young trees and also for the more mature trees nearby to build a truly bio-diverse habitat for wildlife and to give something back to nature.

Maybe by then, we'll even have some Goodgym outdoor clothing too.

Despite the overnight snow, 3 hardy Goodgymers braved the plummeting temperatures to help in the fight against plastic.

With minimal fuss, we coolly ran the 3-ish km to Merseyway Workshop and Plastic Shed. Caitlin, despite a sniffly cold and a wild swim in the morning, was overjoyed by our arrival to finish off the mountain of bags. Numb with excitement (or cold) we crisply sorted the bags by colour, managing to get through the remaining bag collection. The background of music and pottery was an ideal backdrop to the busy sorting.

Plastic waste is snow joke and we were happy to help, open to a future invitation to help out the community group.

Yesterday saw the return of the annual Manchester 24 Hour Run Against Homelessness. 🏃‍♀️

Between us, we completed a total of 17 laps and 85 km (not including run commutes!). 🎉

Hannah and Simone kicked things off with a walking lap to check out the route. 😍

Over the course of the evening, Hannah, Ben, Laura and Mai then volunteered as run leaders for specific laps – some of us taking on speedy 27.5 minute pacing and others demonstrating the important role of tail runner! 😊

A big shout out to Simone who stayed for the entire evening and cheered us on whilst soaking up the atmosphere! ❤️

It was great to bump into long-lost Goodgymer Pete and have a catch-up! 🏃

8pm was our scheduled GoodGym slot and we chatted our way round the course, completing the second and third laps for some and drawing our evening to a close. 🏃‍♂️

Ben continued with a couple of volunteer run leader slots before returning with Juno 🐶 in the morning to complete a further 3 laps – taking his total to 7! 🙌