It was great to have so many people join us for the first time tonight: welcome to Jenny, Oliver, Mitch, Richard, Jo and Isabel! We got warmed up, marvelled at the fact that 11% of the runners here tonight were called Richard, then split up into our respective groups.

Mel led a walk and chat litter-picking group on a couple of kilometre tour around the local area. It was a well-planned route as, even though right in the centre of town, the group found loads of rubbish and hauled a load of bags to a pick-up point for Bristol Waste. Despite being busy litter-bees, they still had time to take some power stance litter-picking photos. All in a night's work!

The Black Arrows

Meanwhile, the rest of us set off towards St Werburghs, led by our very own acrobatic running crew, The Black Arrows, who stunned us with performances of running in squares, arrows and straight lines. The talent really never ends here at GoodGym Bristol. We soon arrived at our two neighbouring tasks for the evening, St Werburgh's City Farm Community Garden and Narroways. The charities had even had a chinwag before we arrived to work out how many of us each of them needed!

The Tree Musketeers

Seven GoodGymers headed off with Chris from Narroways to the nature reserve to do some cutting back of the overgrown areas. This involved lots of bramble cutting, hacking at long grass and weeds (which Richard got scarily into), cutting back overgrown trees and bushes and trying to remove ash saplings. Chris offered a prize for anyone who could do this (I embarrassed myself having a go and not moving it in the slightest) - top tip, remove your saplings when they are tiny!

Meanwhile the rest of the group were split into seven teams in the Community Gardens. Half of the teams were allocated an area of the gardens to tackle the bindweed which has spread across the whole area during the hot summer. The other teams were set to work to remove a tree which had fallen onto the path, stopping it from being accessible and doing compost heap runs. Liam had a blissful half hour peacefully watering the vegetables and Chris and Richard got the hard job with turning compost at the farm.

Living on barrow-ed time

The time went too quickly and we had to drag people away from their bindweed to run home. The team from the gardens were really pleased what our 'team of locusts' had got done, and we wished them farewell for the last of our light evenings at the gardens this year.

We headed back and did a lunge stop. After 5 minutes and legs beginning to burn, we got the group back together and headed back to Queen Square for a much-needed stretch off.

It was a bumper night of GoodGym tonight in Bristol with 50 runners and 8 people joining us for the first time: welcome Patricia, Ailish, Joe, Kate, Jonny, Thomas, Lucy and Cavid!

Skipping prison

We quickly split into our two groups for the evening. Alice W was taking a group to The Island, an arts and events charity, on a 2km round trip. When they arrived, they were set to work with filling the skip that they had hired specially for GoodGym's arrival with all sorts of no-longer usable chairs and tables. The team worked in super-fast time and soon the skip was filled. Tom then gave them a tour of the space to give them a bit more of an idea of the work they do. This included a trip to the underground cells and an arts space which was so 'arty' that it inspired the group to do a Mannequin Challenge in it... Spot the blinkers.

Meanwhile the rest of the group headed on a 7km run to help LitterArti in Easton. They paint pillars in an underpass which has a skatepark in it. This is used regularly by local people and children, but the council do not keep it litter-free. Therefore, it is down to volunteers to do this. The group of 33 armed themselves with litter-pickers, bin bags, recycling bags and gloves and got to work. They spread over the area and, with the help of a couple of the skate-park users, teamed together to gather 24 bags of rubbish and recycling, as well as several sofas, a mattress and more. There was an incredible difference in the 20 minutes the team worked, so much so that the skaters gave them a round of applause when we headed off for our run home.

On our return we had a game of Runner, Runner, the GoodGym version of British Bulldogs to get rid of any leftover energy, then got excited for this weekend's South West Summer Party hearing the line-up from Matt. It's not to be missed!