🙌19 excellent GoodGymmers arrived for our double-deed group run today. We were thrilled to welcome Madeleine for her first session with us and hope you enjoyed it 👋

🎤After a quick round of "What did you want to be when you were younger?" (which featured Blue Peter presenters and pop singers), Mitch led his team in a running warm up as they set off for Heworth Without. Here's what he had to say about what they got up to...

⚡So despite the far distance, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five arrived at Jubilee Wood. Unfortunately, some vandals had removed some trees, so we were first tasked with planting some new ones 🌱

💪After a quick 15 minutes of digging, we had the trees all planted!

🌳Since we'd made quick work of the trees, we were then tasked with filling in some low spots with bark. These are getting waterlogged in rain, so needed topping up. Not wasting any time, we got straight to work, barrowing and spreading the woodchip. After 30 minutes, we'd made a massive start, but will need to come back to fill in the rest of the low spots 💦

🚚Meanwhile, the rest of us warmed up round the car park then set off for West Bank Park. After leading us to the wrong entrance (sorry everyone), we eventually tracked down Kristina and the van. The rain threatened but luckily didn't really materialise into anything significant (which Ed was particularly grateful for). And what a treat she had in store for us, with not one but two "interesting" tasks for us 🤔

🌊Half the group were tasked with clearing the pond. Armed with heavy metal spikes (aka fake mics for the wannabe popstars among us), we started off watching Ed and Stef stab holes in the pond liner, whilst being on frog and newt watch. Sadly, this wasn't overly successful so other tactics were employed. These included shovelling out stones, digging trenches and eventually organising a bucket relay 💨

🤢Oh, and all of this with the background smell of pond water and the very real risk of being splash with/falling into said smelly pond water. We like to live on the edge here 🤠

🦎On the plus side, a newt and a frog were both rescued from the pond during our work 🐸

💡Kristina has a number of ideas of what she'd like to do with the pond. One idea is to build another pond, with various options for alternative lining material (possibly concrete). Another is to build a bog area 🐾

🤺Meanwhile, the less mucky crew were constructing a fence. Dom and Martin banged fence posts in while Claire, Madeleine and Amy foraged for and cut up brash, which will eventually form part of the fence. The background to this task was the satisfying clunk of the fence posts being pushed in 👌

😳 Both our West Bank Park tasks revealed themselves to be bigger than we'd bargained for. And when we realised that all the pond tools should probably be cleaned before being put back in the van, we sadly had to sacrifice our intended hill reps. Everyone was pleased to learn that there was still a hill on the route back to base though, so we got some fitness in there (along with the mattocking, malloting, shovelling and barrowing that was part of the tasks) 👍

🏃‍♀️🏃‍♂️A slightly speedier run back to base minus a few people who decided to head straight home meant that we were less late back than we might have been, and were nearer in arrival time to our Heworth friends 😁

🥳Thank you for your hard work tonight everyone. We may not be able to say that the West Bank Park pond looks better than when we arrived but it's in a position for the work to be continued by Kristina's group on Thursday. And I understand that there may be another session at Heworth to finish the work there too 😎