Tonight marked 5 years since GoodGym Norwich first launched back in June 2017.

Bill and Katy (plus myself) were the only ones from that very first Group Run who could make this evening.

Congratulations to Jen who has now completed 50 good deeds!

The task was to visit the tenants at Redmayne View Care Home. We had such a lovely evening with them, swapping stories, reminiscing and eating strawberries & cream.

We topped off the evening with some chips and a drink at the pub, where we were joined by Robert and Elizabeth.

Here's what we got up to at this week's Monday Rainy Run.

A big welcome to Dominic (Hannah's other half) and Mark on their 1st GoodGym encounter.

Kathryn and Hannah were completing their 10th good deeds, well done to both of you!

With it being an outdoor task, it was looking grim with the rain belting down. We began with a new style warm-up (after not being allowed to do inside The Forum this week :-|) and then we set off on the short 1.5km trot down to the Norwich Train Station, with Katy kindly being backrunner.

Sue and her amazing team of volunteers met at the Norwich Train Station gardens with an array of spades and forks (puns will be coming up soon). The job we had was to dig up deep rose bushes and the only way to do this was to fork them deep to get the end result we wanted.

As the area wasn't large enough for 26 GoodGymers, I decided we'd fork in pairs so one person would fork while the other ran a loop around Riverside then tagged their buddy and they swap over. This format happened to make it one of our most physical tasks we've had as everyone was both running and forking all evening. By the end of it we were all gleaming and a little wet, from the rain.

After nearly an hour of hard work, we headed back and stopped of in the Xmas tunnel of love for some colourful photos.

As you can imagine, there were plenty of borderline puns for the title of this run report but we voted on Jonathan's more clean cut version.

I had a personal thank you from Sue and her team for what a great job everyone had done at the task so well done everyone.

Next week we are heading to the Norwich Food Bank again to Make Xmas Boxes.

I like meeting at The Forum even more this time of year with all of the Xmas lights and the tunnel of love (light) nearby.

We had 3 new runners this week so a big welcome to Laura, Helen and Jane.

Thank you to Amy for being back runner this week.

Alice was completing her 10th good deed and Sophie her 25th good deed! Well done to both of you.

Katy, Bill and Jasmine walked to the task.

We were visiting the Hamlet Charity's Adult's Centre to play some games with their members. These games included limbo (which I'm pretty poor at!) a bell obstacle course and then we finished up with a game of just dance (which I'm also pretty poor at!).

It was great for their members to have us join them.

There were some pretty good limbo skills in the GG crew, notably Hannah, Elliot and Emily!

Next week we're doing some pruning at Norwich Train Station.

A visit to Norwich Foodbank is always a very rewarding task and for this we had a whopping 36 GoodGymers come out to attend... in the rain yet again!

A big welcome to 3 new runners in Esther, Jess and Andrew, I hope you all enjoyed your 1st GoodGym experience :-)

A thank you to Bill and Elizabeth for being back runners.

After a warm-up that included (everyone's favourite) Bear Crawls, we set out on the soggy 3km outward journey. As there were so many of us (and you all know how much I love Health & Safety...) I put everyone in pairs so that one person can be in the warehouse while the other does a running loop, then they swap over. So as well as doing good, everyone got to run a little further than they expected to ;-)

Keith, the warehouse manager, had a mixture of things for us to do, which included: date sorting tins of beans, sorting out 2020 food items, weighing crates of new items, sorting Xmas items, sorting nappies, preparing Xmas boxes, sorting coffee/tea/hot chocolate items as well as some other jobs.

After 40 minutes of doing these tasks and running in between, we set off on our way back.

Helping with Norwich Foodbank for Christmas hampers

If you'd like to help the foodbank with their donations for the Xmas boxes, they're in need of the following items:

• Tins/cartons of tomatoes
• Tinned vegetables
• Long-life fruit juice
• UHT Milk
• Pasta sauce
• Rice pudding/custard
• Instant mash
• Tinned fruit
• Tea
• Tinned meat
• Tinned fish
• Christmas treats - chocolate/sweets/crisps etc

If you bring them along to Goodgym on a Monday night, we'll collate any items together and make sure they get to the foodbank. If you can do this by the end of November this will help with distribution in time for Christmas!

Reminder of the following:

Parkour Social Jump is this Wednesday.

GoodGym Norwich Xmas Meal is on Wednesday 11th December.

If you want to join the Secret Santa you need to sign up by lunchtime today!

Next week's Group Run is a Games Night @ The Hamlet Adult's Centre.