The Love Luton RunFest is coming up, and for Luton's biggest running event some roads will be closed, so it was our task this evening to run a long section of the route and deliver letters informing the residents of the details of the road closure.

With walkers and runners on the task the walkers started in town and delivered their way out, while the runners ran out and started delivering they way back into town. Meeting in the middle with all the houses notified we declared the task complete and returned to the start point.

3 Goodgymers went rogue and traveled north to Kempston to join Planet Patrol and Canoe Trails in a tidy up litter pick of the river Great Ouse.

After being kitted out and briefed we took to our paddleboards for a saunter up to the mill at Kempston, picking litter from the reeds and banks which would be missed from a land litter pick.

Ducks, butterflies and dragonflies were out, along with a very nosey heron!

A haul of a barbeque, iron rod and the usual bottles, cans and unnecessary plastic items were collected in our Planet Patrol baskets. And of course a shopping trolley from Morrison's...because why not!!

Everyone stayed dry and we will definitely look to support this group again in the coming months.

This week it was a return to the Brown Books shop for another session pushing this community bookshop one step closer to re-opening.

On the way there, David and Chrisshane worked together on Chrisshanes week 4 of Couch to 5k, doing a loop with four 5 minute runs with walking rests in between. Chrisshane is doing fantastically at building her running stamina!

Completing the run on arrival at the shop the rest of the gang were hard at work sorting the space out. All the books and other stuff had arrived from storage and needed putting out on shelves. Masking tape needed peeling, paint splashes on the floor needed scrubbing up and the whole floor mopped clean of all the building grime from the last week.

We soon transformed the shop from what looked like a junk shop of piles of boxes and bits, into a clean, spacious area ready to be arranged to entice readers in to browse the books.

Four Goodgymers made their way to the Level Trust Uniform Exchange to help sort through a mountain of recent donations.

We were greeted by Kim and Elaine from Level Trust and they explained what each piece of donated clothing should be checked for. Usable clothes were sorted into crates and unusable donations sorted into bags (one for clothes with logos, one for clothes without).

We got into a steady rhythm and quickly worked through tens of bags, with calls of ‘No go logo’ and ‘no go no logo’ as we went. Happily, lots of the donations were in good condition, so once they’re washed and dried they can be added to stock and hopefully used again.

Lots still to do, so we’ll be back!

The GoodGymers joined up with the team at Peoples Park for the monthly litter pick. Despite the warm weather (which usually means more litter) the overall haul wasn’t as much as expected!

However we did find some litter pick firsts during today’s task! A whole BBQ complete with utensils AND a full tray of meat 🤣, we also stumbled across a toy doll and a Halloween pumpkin outfit, all a bit creepy when put together.