We avoided today's windy weather and dark clouds and gathered for a Double Leaf Whammy, running to help Hotwells and Redcliffe Development Group clearing leaves at Holy Trinity Church and Penny Brohn with leafleting for their Christmas Concert on 6th December.

Penny for your thoughts

Alice D headed off with a group of 9 hardy runners to battle the hills of Clifton to distribute 1 million (or probably 500) leaflets in just 45 minutes around the area. Penny Brohn will be so pleased with this increased advertising. I will give them a head's up about booking out the stadium...

Unbeleafable

Meanwhile, the rest of the group headed to Holy Trinity Church and were split into groups for various jobs. The Leaf Team were armed with brushes, rakes and recycling bags to tackle the mounds of leaves on the pathways and grass. Of course this couldn't be done without throwing and kicking a good load around before getting down to business.

The Loppers got to work clipping back bushes to clear an entrance to.... a telephone box. We marvelled at the idea that people were still using the telephone box, and marvelled further when we realised that we were in fact clearing the window to the box rather than the entrance. Meanwhile, Liam and Dhanesh casually sawed down a tree in approximately 8 minutes, showing their future careers as tree surgeons.

Finally, The Leafleters were kitted out with their maps and their target destinations and split into three teams to distribute as many hundreds of leaflets for Christmas events as they could.

Not mulch left

By 7.30, nothing was leaf-left, including the digestive biscuits. We regrouped and ran back to the Queen Square, stopping for some cheeky sprints and squat jumps along the way.

Thanks to Lexi, Richard, Gary and Jack for tonight's puns

It was great to have Hannah, Katie, BiBi and Jim join us for their first GoodGym run tonight - we hope to see you again soon! We were also delighted to celebrate Phill's 50th Good Deed, which he did in true Phill-style by getting completely stuck in with the task and covered in paint. Congratulations Phill!

After running circles around the warm-up, we split into two groups to conquer as much good as we could tonight.

Alice D led a group of 17 over to Felix Road Adventure Playground where they battled through the crowds to get into the playground and met Zoe. She set the group to work on a mass weed clearance of the playground. With all-hands-on-deck, the group made a massive dent in the huge area, and got rid of several wheelbarrows of weeds in the process. Chris even had a chance to show everyone his wheelbarrow racing skills - check them out here.

Going South

The rest of the group headed to the Southville Centre where we met Hugh. This local community centre is extremely busy with lots of groups and activities using it during the week, so they were keen to put some extra hands to good use on a quieter evening. They had a whole load of painting to do, so we split as many of the paintbrushes as were available between the group, assigned a tall person per section and four teams set to work painting both of the toilets, the bin shed and protecting the outdoor wood.

The lucky remaining people were tasked with a circuit in the outdoor area, cheered on by the outdoor painters. After three teams had rotated through the circuit, this week's painting was almost complete. We feasted on celebratory chocolate (Hugh knows how to treat us) and headed back to town, but not without stopping to complete this week's Burpee Challenge on the way. More than 600 burpees between the group later, Will, Richard and Daniel were crowned Burpee Champions.

We dragged our slightly-more-tired-now legs back to Queen Square and feasted on Phill's incredible vegan brownies (which you can make again ANYTIME), and then headed for this month's GoodGym Eats at Franco Manca, deeeed-licious.

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.

Good Cheer

Welcome to Joseph and Mark who joined us for the first time tonight. It was also great to celebrate not one but two GoodGym birthdays: 🎉HAPPY BIRTHDAY MATT AND LAURA!🎉

A puzzling task

Alice D did a wonderful job leading a group to Emmaus on her inaugural run leading evening. At Emmaus, the group met Xanne who explained their tasks for the evening and set them to work around the warehouse. The group got to work sorting donations to find the weirdest items and figuring out puzzles, including puzzling their way through subbuteo (thank goodness, or else what would the pun title have been).

Meanwhile, the rest of the group headed to Cherry Tree Garden. Julia set us to work on cutting back the overgrown areas, pruning a tree back to life and weeding the flower areas. The group split into half so while half of the group channeled their inner-Charlie Dimmocks, the rest of the group went to Victoria Park to do hill reps. We swapped over halfway through and the overall conclusion was that the group definitely prefer gardening to hills. After half an hour, the area was looking remarkably better and we had filled 5 garden waste bags.

A little pick-me-up

We finished the night with a team relay including a carrying-your-teammate round, with tactics ranging from piggy-backs to queen's chairs. Georgia's team raced home and were crowned victorious.

We headed off to celebrate with Laura and Matt and a double dose of chocolate cake, as well as celebrate Jenny's Bristol-cake win from the weekend and Darren's belated cheese-chasing medal!