It's our Birthday!

To celebrate GoodGym Oxford being 6 years old a bevy of GoodGymers got together at County Hall. Of course we had to include a Good Deed in our birthday celebrations (no Wednesday is complete without one), so we packaged up 3 boxes of old trainers to send to JogOn for repurposing and recycling. These had been collected up from friends, family and colleagues over the previous few weeks, saving them from going to landfill.

With 26 GoodGymers in attendance that task was complete in record time, leaving us the rest of the evening to chat over drinks and nibbles, reminiscing about the past 6 years and speculating about what the future might bring.

Our 6 year Good Deed count is 8038. Happy Birthday to Us!

with Goodgym Reading launching recently, we thought that February would be the perfect time for a trip to Prospect parkrun. Little did we know that February would mean very boggy conditions!

Prospect parkrun is a lovely course - two laps around the park, with a couple of small slopes and quite a few puddles to dodge. We admired the array of ancient trees along the route as well.

Everyone managed to stay upright in the mud and Poppy dog even managed a sub-30 time as part of her couch-to-5k training!

It was fab to link up with some of our Reading counterparts and hand out some flyers to the other runners, Ellie was a one woman cheerleader for Goodgym!

After running and marketing we headed to the very lovely cafe for the all important coffee and pastries and discussed ither parkruns that we'd like to visit this year! Keep your eyes peeled for more parkrun tourism in the near future.

On Wednesday we rounded off a January full of Good Deeds with a litter pick in Headington. In an exciting development we were joined by a journalist from ITV, who was filming a piece on GoodGym which will show on the 6pm news in a few weeks' time. So, alongside our expert litter picking, this week we got to polish our public speaking/acting skills. Cue some 'fake' running (there was real running too!), performative litter picking, and expert handling of hecklers while being interviewed by Ben.

Filming complete, we picked up the pace on our litter picking and made sure we'd done a thorough clean up of Gipsy Lane before we had to call time on the session.

Welcome to GoodGym Stephen!

We usually try to get to West Oxford for a litter pick early in the year, and despite the ongoing challenges of accessing the Botley Road, we headed there last night for a clean up.

We split into 3 groups and allowed ourselves an hour to blitz the trash. Given the cold weather we found a surprising amount of discarded clothing (wouldn't you notice that you'd left your coat on the cemetery gate?!), as well as a bags full of the usual suspects (cans, bottles), and more unusual items (a whole block of cheese, part of a car bumper, MANY Christmas trees, a French dictionary).

All in all, a good amount of rubbish got picked and bagged, leaving the area looking a little more loved.

Welcome to GoodGym James!