What a fab community mission this evening! Five great GoodGymers met at St David’s church to help paint their communal hall and create a bright, fresh space for their soup kitchen, toddler groups and community events.

It was a festive evening with Hannah, Lisa, Florence and Liz singing Christmas tunes and Craig hitting the high notes in Wham’s Last Christmas!

Also congratulations to Lisa for hitting her golden anniversary - a whopping 50 GoodGym missions! Hurrah!

An amazing evening doing good - well done team!

11 GoodGymers had the best of times litter-picking and getting The Secret Garden in Newtown ready for autumn! Getting fit by doing good is just the BEST!

The evening started with 5 of us doing a fitness session in Belmont Park. We ran laps in the park and carried out a circuit session with 5 different stations. Fantastic effort with all those squats, lunges, press-ups and planks!

We then walked over to the task location where we met the rest of the gang. Great to have Liz back with us after a bit of a break and Miriam for her second Community Missions! We hope you enjoyed it! After having shared some news and the best things that has happened to us since last week (curries, getting allotments, birthdays and seeing friends were some of things mentioned), we then entered into the SECRET GARDEN of Newtown!

What an amazing spot!

Pat, the task-owner, took over this little strip of land in the beginning of lockdown back in March and has since then transformed it into a stunning little garden that now can be enjoyed by local residents, families and hopefully, in the near future, the kids from the local school around the corner.

There is even a little hedgehog house for homeless hedgehogs!

Our task was to weed the vegetable patches and sweep up the path. It was such lovely work, there was lots of laughing a chatting going on and I think we all very much enjoyed discovering the hidden ornaments and animal sculptures among the vegetables!

In order to work safely, with social distancing, we also sent a few GoodGymers out for a litter-pick in the surrounding streets which was very much needed! In 45 minutes they filled 4 bin bags! Amazing work!

I don't know how you all felt, but for me this evening was one of those amazing GoodGym sessions that lifted my spirits more than you could ever think. It was so nice to get stuck in together at the task, so brilliant to chat and catch with you all and as always incredible to see what a difference we made by working together! It felt like a rare chance to forget about everything else going on in the world at the moment and just enjoy that brilliant sense of belonging to a community where so many positive vibes are shared.

I hope to see you all very soon again! Take a look at upcoming Community Missions here and sign up!

28 runners ran 4 k to prepare Newtown’s Community Preschool for the start of term. Brilliant to see so many runners returning again and fantastic to welcome 18 (!) new runners to our group!

After signing in and locking our bags up at the Phoenix Art Center we jogged over to the Rougemont Gardens for a dynamic warm up session. It is hard to say what we enjoyed the most- the actual warm-up exercises or the cheering on by some slightly merry members of the public?

We then had a nice and flat (at least by Exeter standards) 2 k run to the task, Newtowns Community Preschool. The evening was nice and warm and it was lovely to hear everyone chatting along the way. We stopped at regular intervals to re-groups and we also managed some press-ups, wall squats, lunges and triceps dips. Great work everyone and a big thank you to Sam who back marked so that no one got left behind!

At the preschool we were welcomed by Debbie who had filled a big white board with lists of jobs that needed doing. There was certainly a lot to do and great with such a variety of jobs! We quickly got stuck in with the following:

• Weeding
• Sanding down shelves
• Digging
• Transporting soil in wheelbarrows
• Clearing out and refilling a sandpit
• Painting
• Making a mud kitchen
• Cleaning carpets and walls

It was amazing to see how much we achieved in just 40 minutes! The mud kitchen was made with the soil that we dug up on our launch evening at the community building in Belmont park. Great to see this come to use! The whole preschool looked great when we left.

The children will love it when they come back after their summer holidays!

On the return run we stopped in Belmont Park for a HIIT style circuit training session, which also included a running element. Everyone gave it all they had and worked super hard! We had a lot of faces matching the red GoodGymt-shirt. Obviously something to aim for every week!

After the circuit training we ran back to the Phoenix where we carried out some stretches and talked about some dates for our diaries:

Saturday 7th September: If you’re free and feel like doing doing a Parkrun come along to Exeter Riverside Parkrun this Saturday (7th). We hope to be a few GoodGym runners there together and we can have some coffee and cake (obviously just as important as running) afterwards. A great way to kick start the weekend!

Saturday 21st September: We have our very first community mission in Exeter on Saturday 21st September. This is a perfect date for it as it is the same day as the GoodGym will make a nationwide effort to complete the most community missions ever in one day, as part of the GoodGym 10 year anniversary celebrations! Amazingly it looks like our community mission will take place at the Westbank which is fantastic as the Westbank is funding the GoodGym in our area! More information about this will follow soon. For now just save the date. It will be fab!

Next Group Run: Next week we will run to Mincinglake and Marypole allotments to help them develop one of their plots.The run is 5 k in total, with a few hills, but nothing too steep! All abilities are welcome! We will also start with our monthly core session next week. Sign up here to join! It will be great to see you there!

To finish of with I have to say brilliant work again everyone! So happy to see our group growing and to get to know you all! Let’s keep up the good work and get fit by doing good!