On the first run of the 2020 and of the decade GoodGym Bath ran to help out St John's Court, a sheltered living space in Bath. We had 15 runners volunteer their Tuesday evening to help take down and tidy away Christmas decorations. We finished early and went for a run around Victoria Park, making a total of 4.4km distance ran. Not bad for a January!

Welcome, Majid!

We met at the leisure centre, as we always do, at 6.15pm and welcomed a new runner, Majid, to the group. Majid spotted us before Christmas in our red t-shirts, proving that wearing the red tops proudly is the best form of advertising! Thanks for coming along last night, Majid, and we hope you will come and join us again soon.

Latest GoodGym news

Before we started I shared the latest news with everyone:

• Rachel has very kindly set up a GoodGym Bath Strava running club so that we can motivate each other more easily. It's a good way to find good running routes, too. Please follow the link and join us!
• Related to the above please connect your Strava account to your GoodGym account (you can do this in your settings on the GoodGym website). This will help us in the January challenge! In the challenge, we are competing with all other areas to try and get the most good deeds done and run the greatest distance in January. You can see the leaderboard here. Also: any runs you do outside of GoodGym count towards this if you link Strava to your GoodGym account.
• We have several fun Community Missions happening in Bath/Bristol over the coming weekend. Sign up and help us in the January challenge!

On to the task!

It was only a short run last night along the river Avon to St John's Court. We have helped them several times before with tasks like painting benches and garden furniture. In December we put up Christmas decorations for the Resident's Association around their communal spaces. Lots of the residents aren't able enough to take down the decorations and the staff and volunteers don't have the time to do it, so we came along and gave a helping hand!

We split into small groups to take down the festivities. There were teams wrestling Christmas trees into boxes, reaching up high to taken down hanging decorations and wrapping up long lines of beads. We then formed a chain and stored all of the boxes and bags upstairs for next year. Once we finished we gave the communal areas a good hoovering to clear up the explosion of glitter and pine needles that we left behind in our wake! We reset the main cafe area and got it ready for the coffee morning that is being hosted on Wednesday. Good work GoodGym!

We really got stuck into the task at hand and we ended up finishing much earlier than expected. What a credit to a good turnout and a great attitude! To make use of the leftover time I led the runners on a loop up to Bath's beautiful Royal Crescent and through Victoria Park. We are really lucky to be able to enjoy these fantastic sights on demand!

Thanks!

Thanks to everyone who came along and made last night a success. Thanks in particular to the team at St John's who hosted us for the task and thanks to Rachel for backmarking for us!