It's the most wonderful time of the year!... Especially when 30 GoodGym runners show up to get fit and do good in Cardiff

Only 8 sleeps left until Christmas! Isn't that exciting? At GoodGym Cardiff it still feels like we had a big Christmas present early, winning the Getting Wales Active award!

To start the night we did a warm up and said what our favourite thing about Christmas was. Some people said presents, some said Christmas dinners and others said spending time with family.

We acknowledged achievements / goings on over the past week, which included:

• Community Mission to help erect a tent at the Samye Foundation
• Community Mission to help paint a flat ready for Refugees to move in
• Nathan and Ellen completed a mission to help an older person!
• Hike up Pen Y Fan!
• A social outing to Winter Wonderland ice skating
• On Saturday 36 of us celebrated Christmas at the GoodGym Cardiff Christmas party at The Classroom

First good deeds of the night

The walking group walked around town, spreading Christmas cheer for all to hear. They were handing out Christmas cards to members of the public saying "Merry Christmas". They reported a mixed response and some people thought there was a catch! There was no catch and we just wanted to make people smile :).

Whilst the walking talking group were handing out Christmas Cards in town, the runners, with presents in arms - quite literally -were heading over to Nightingale House to deliver gifts to the residents. Sophie Hastings, a GoodGym runner, had her work kindly donate gifts this year and we got to run them to Nightingale House.

Onto the next good deed of the night

We arrived back to Big Moose about 7.25pm. Now was the time to do another good deed of the night! Matt, a lovely employee of Big Moose, gave us lots of tasks that the charity needed our help with. Tasks we helped with included:

• Baking cookies and biscuits
• Making framed certificates for the attendees of the Big Moose Supertri event
• Putting lush products and framed certificates inside goodie bags
• Sorting and stock counting Big Moose Merchandise
• Giving Big Moose a touch up of paint to keep it looking fabulous!

Matt couldn't believe the speed at which we worked. It was safe to say we were very busy efficient GoodGym elves.

** Post run**

After the evenings events we headed to the Glassworks for a social drink of water, coffee and for some something stronger Ahem Two pint tuesday for some...

Well done tonight. It was our final group run of the year and boy did we go out with a bang! Nightingale House were so grateful for the gifts... we were more than 3 kings bringing gold frankincense and myrrh that's for sure! Big Moose were immensely thankful for our help (Matt was in disbelief with how much we got done and how quickly we did it). The members of the public who have received cards wishing them a Merry Christmas, well who knows, we may have brightened someones Christmas... we may even be the only person wishing them a Merry Christmas - we may never know.

Happy New Year everyone - You are the best x

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Tweet off Leaderboard 2020

There was a special opportunity for one runner to get ahead on the 2020 tweet off leaderboard. The competition was fierce. Can Lucy retain the tweet off crown? Only time we will tell. The winner tonight however was Marie! A huge well done. The scores are as follows:

• MOH - 1

Happy Birthday to us, Happy Birthday to us, Happy Birthday to GoodGym Cardiff, Happy Birthday to us!

Yes, that's right, it's our birthday. GG Cardiff is now two years old! The first GoodGym run ever took place in Cardiff on Tuesday 23rd May 2017 - Click here to see photos from the first ever run and read about what we got up to.

This week's run started with a head count, stating our name and breaking the ice by saying our favourite animal. We also acknowledged Emma reaching the 50 good deed milestone. Emma was awarded with her own 50 good deed badge tonight. She can also claim her milestone t-shirt. It was so lovely to see her with a well deserved HUGE smile on her face. We also gave a HUGE WELCOME TO JOSIE, Josie was joining us for her first ever GoodGym run after hearing about GoodGym at the Big Cardiff Social Run that took place last week.

We didn't waste anymore time as we knew Poppy was waiting for us at the Global Gardens Allotment in Gabalfa. We therefore split into 3 groups; Adam and Welsh Dave led the speedy group whilst Ben and Mikey led the Sexy runners. Ellen led the walking group.

The sexy runners, not wasting the opportunity to run through a park in good weather, took a detour though Alexander park. Ben made up an exercise called 'Birthday squats' that everyone joined in with - wooo... well done peeps!

Welcome to the Global Gardens Allotment GoodGym

At the Global Gardens Allotment: Poppy greeted us with a huge smile. It was so wonderful seeing her again as our last visit to the allotment was last Autumn.

The tasks Poppy set us this evening included:

• Sorting boots into their pairs - This task was called booty bingo!
• Weeding the plantation beds
• Watering the plants
• Digging over soil
• Moving rocks and making a rock pile

Litter Pickers

The litter pickers were 'litterally' amazing. Ellen said passers by were saying "Oh look it's GoodGym" and some even stopped to ask how they could get involved. The litter picker extraordinaires managed to fill 3 bags of litter in the time they spent roaming the streets of Cathays - Fab work!

Done already? Wow - You're quick

Poppy was impressed with how much we got done in the allotted time - I told her her we work fast! The boots got sorted, the plantation beds got weeded, the plants got watered, the soil got dug over and, guess what, the rocks got moved into a rock pile. A very successful group run to start off GoodGym's third year

The winner of this week's tweet off was Lucy M. Well done Ms Speedy! - Come on peeps. Practice your tweeting. There must be someone out their who can stop Lucy's winning streak. Here is the tweet off leaderboard -

• LM 7
• EW 2
• MG 2
• NS 2
• MJ 2
• DRN 1
• BA 1
• NI 1
• AG 1
• WD 1

Remember the RunPunStiltskin award? - Whoever could come up with the pun for the run would win the virtual award. Well this week Lowri wins it! Llongyfarchiadau Lowri!

On the 30th June our mission was complete... We hiked Mount Snowdon.

*This evening 10 awesome runners showed up eager to run to help out the Samye Foundation. *

Our route to the Samye was quite adventurous! We all felt like Lord of the Rings characters. We went around Cardiff castle doing some interval work and then played follow the leader which involved running in some odd and obscure directions. Then we played a new game which we haven't played before at GoodGym Cardiff called.Guess the movie and avoid the sprint - You might be wondering how this game works, well, it's quite simple, if you guess the film the quote comes from then you don't have to sprint whilst everyone else does.... Some of the quotes were... "I carried a watermelon", "I will see you again, but not yet, not yet". Click the quotes to get the answers!

After some fun and games we continued our run, and then in the distance we spotted an outdoor adventure playground - YIPEE everyone shouted... Lowri and Tom both jumped in the air with excitement too, and without hesitation we all lined up and took on the outdoor assault course challenge. It was actually pretty damn hard... I don't think anyone managed it without falling off.

Welcome to Samye again GoodGym!

Lorraine greeted us with the warmest of smiles. It has been a while since we ran to Samye and we were all looking forward to it. And, after drinking some much needed fluid, Lorraine explained to us our task for the evening and we all got stuck straight in.

• Team Flowerbed - Lowri, Maya, Rosie, Pablo and Lorena emptied soil into the flower beds, then constructed a fence within it and planted small shrubs and plants.
• The metal arch constructors - Tom and Mikey (or Paul and Barry Chuckle) built and positioned the metal arch frame.
• Hole diggers - Lucy and Rachel dug a really deep hole and then planted a wisteria tree.

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Riddle for the run

Can you name three consecutive days without using the words Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday ?

Click here for the answer

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The transformation was incredible - Just look at the photos! Well done everyone :) Lorraine was so pleased by how much we were able to do. She also really kindly ordered us pizza as a snack as a way of saying thank you. It was so delicious too!

Time to run home!

With our stomach full of pizza it was time to run off.

• A MASSIVE thank you to Maya who is now going home for the summer and will then be working abroad for a year conducting important research which hopes to preserve animal species - Maya you will be greatly missed and it has been a real pleasure running with you since you joined GoodGym last year. Best of luck with your studies and whenever you get the opportunity to come back, please do!

On a balmy evening in Cardiff, a smallish but perfectly formed group of great GoodGymmers ran over 6k to tidy up the grounds around the STAR Hub in Splott!

This week, our regular running crowd was greatly diminished by the absence of 9 runners who went to the Bucharest Running Festival over the weekend. Well done all who ran and joined in the festivities. Can't wait to hear more news of the races next week! Further good news is that our task numbers were buoyed up by 3 new faces: firstly by a guest from the east, Alex from GoodGym HQ. He was in Swansea looking into a possible new GoodGym there, and wanted to join us here in Cardiff for the group task. Great to meet you Alex, hope to see you again in South Wales soon! Secondly, forget Two-Drink Tuesday, it was Two-LACE Tuesday last night! A couple of our regular runners Pablo and Fiona brought along friends: welcome Emily and Tanya! Luckily I had two red laces on me to hand out - whew!

So after intros all around, and a quick but dynamic warm up, we headed out and made our way to the STAR Hub in Splott. We took a direct route to cover the 2 mile distance in time, which gave as a good opportunity to get in a steady run, with Charlotte and Fiona backmarking - thank you both! We've been to this Hub before, to wash windows in preparation for a royal visit a few months ago. But no royalty this time - just the staff and regulars who were happy to see us. We had a nice intro from Mike the manager on duty, who explained the relationship between the leisure facilities and Cardiff Council, and the work they do to get local children into sports and activities on site. Sounded right up our street, so we were keen to get on and get stuck in. Our task was to litter pick around the grounds of the centre, and we broke into teams of 2-3 and headed out into the fresh air. Before we started, we were alerted to the fact that because a school group had done this task just a week ago, there may not be a lot of litter around. But this is Cardiff where there always seems to be litter 😔. Indeed, our first piece of litter was right in the centre itself - a Penguin Bar wrapper right at my feet (not mine!) Later on, Fiona reminded me of that wrapper and provided the pun for the run: to P-P-Pick up a Penguin. If anyone needs a reminder, here is the reference to P-P-Pick up a Penguin! (Maybe before our time, right folks?)

All in all we collected 6 bags of rubbish - a fab job team GoodGym! Must be all that sunshine 🌞 We then headed back to base, had a good warm down and stretch, and some of us headed off to the local, for a cool drink. Not before we reminded everyone of the First Anniversary Run and Celebration Dinner next week !!!! It's going to be a good one, running to St Monica's Primary School in Cathays and then dinner afterwards at the Stable in town. Get signed up to both on the website and see you there!

Riddle for the Run: What has 6 wheels and flies?