Tonight 11 Brighton Goodgymmers offered a very warm welcome to Megan joining us for the first time, to make us a merry band of 12 get fitter by doing gooders!

We’d barely started our run when we arrived at our destination, Dorset Gardens where we met St James’s Community Action Group member David ready and waiting with a variety of tools to get us to work.

A last minute change of plan to our digging task had us focussing mainly on tackling a variety of weeds including the satisfyingly easy to remove ‘sticky’ and the slightly more difficult to dig up ‘bog’. Many of these weeds were growing around the base of some temporary fence panels that were no longer needed and were in danger of making these unsightly metal barriers a permanent fixture. Once enough weeds had been weeded the fences were liberated and carried to their new temporary home, ready for collection and removal. David was very grateful for our efforts and thanked us for making a big difference to this well used local communal area.

Task complete we headed off for a seafront run towards the Marina pausing to survey the route of ‘The Weakest Link’, a popular relay race held on June 19th where teams of four run 2.5km as a relay and then join up to run the same 2.5km route together as a team. It’s a great evening out, you get to mingle with other local runners. Nobody takes it seriously, there’s only about 2 teams that actually try to win it, everyone else just has a fun night of running, it really is for everyone. The more the merrier, let us know if you're coming here and thanks to Helena for organising.

A fitness session involving squats, skater lunges, burpees, mountain climbers, hill sprints and planks, where passers-by may have been wondering what on earth was causing me to shout

Bum up, bum down, no bananas!

rounded off the evening and now you are all slightly fitter than you were yesterday!

Don’t forget its our parkrun meet up at Hove Park on Saturday. And next week we’ll be enjoying our monthly social where social secretary Nipun gets to perform her final act in this vital role and choose one last pub for us to go to before she heads off to pastures new. Our loss will be Goodgym Richmond’s gain!