Tonight, 40 runners left the bonfires for the evening and headed to the streets to get into a different kind of festive spirit. It was great to have Francesca join us for the first time tonight - welcome Francesca! With a last minute change of plan for the British Heart Foundation, we got to work with distributing the pile of flyers which Children's Hospice South West had provided us with to help them advertise their Santas on the Run event on 8th December.

Santa Claus is Running through Town

Melanie set off with Jack to start the walking group for tonight (making a lovely GoodGym archway for us along the way), and then the rest of us headed towards Southville to get distributing. The group were split into 6 teams and allocated a road each to get leafleting. The teams spread out and in no time and spread the news around the area. The first team back got the brilliant prize of getting to do the most squat jumps and lunges while the rest of the teams got back to the base.

Relay-ing the news

We then headed to our second station where we did our leafleting relay, with Teams 5 and 6 skimming the win a few seconds ahead of Teams 1 and 2. Meanwhile, poor Teams 3 and 4 and pulled the short straw and were on a much longer relay length, so managed to get some extra training in!

We headed back to Queen Square where we added to the night's relaying with our new game: Shona's Deck of Cards featuring lots of burpees, lunges and Darren trying to knock me off my feet with his sprinting.

After all of this, we wished all the weekend's racers good luck and headed to Chilli Daddy for this month's Eats, proving that you don't need fireworks for fire. 🌶️

It was great having Harry, Faria, Kerry, Lucy, Liz and Polina join us for their first GoodGyms tonight and to have Rosie join us for her first GoodGym Bristol session! We were also lucky to have Danica with us who was celebrating her birthday (woohoo! 🎉) and Alex and Emma returning from their recent marathons.

With 46 runners and walkers, we got warmed up with a game of Truth Or Lie with - like most of my warm-up games - a questionable level of understanding of what was going on by most of the group and only vague warmth achieved. We then split into two groups, with Dave leading a smaller group to Emmaus and the rest of us going to St Werburgh's Park Nursery.

Scrubbing up nicely

The Emmaus group were tasked by Xanne from the charity to clean the bric-a-brac ready for sale. They channeled their inner domestic gods and goddesses and did a better job than we do in our own houses of scrubbing up. As always at Emmaus, there is an underlying challenge of find the weirdest donation/prop/hat. This week's contenders included some butterflies and a classic lampshade hat.

Purplesfully doing good

Meanwhile, it was time to play one of our other favourite games at St Werburgh's Park Nursery: Who Can Not Get Paint On Themselves During A Painting Task. This week's added challenges: * The dark * The colour purple

We were met by Mandy from the nursery who had invited us there to help with painting the fencing of a reflection garden they have created in memory of one of their colleagues who passed away earlier this year. We were honoured to be able to be a part of this project, so we balanced a variety of spotlights, lights and torches in the dark area and 14 of our handy GoodGymers got straight to work.

The rest of the group weeded an entire planter at the front, and got stuck in with digging out bindweed, chopping back bushes and general tidying.

Soon it was time for us to head back, and we dragged the reluctant painters away from the final touch-ups on the fence to jog our way back to Queen Square. Great work everyone!

Lots of people today - attracted both by the propect of helping establish a brand new community garden and just possibly also by a very manageable 1k run to get there.

The community garden is to be located in the open patch of land behind a block of flats and is the joint project of one of the residents and our host for today, Jane from Jump Start. Jane runs a fitness session for kids in the space and was keen to get them involved them in the work today - they seemed to be having lots of fun carrying roots and branches to the compost pile, and having a go with some of the tools!

That's not to say there wasn't fun to be had for our runners - with spades, pick axes and rakes supplied by the excellent Park Works project, we made great progress clearing a wide band of land around the newly sited benches so it could be used for planting and be a welcoming place for some of the parents and more elderly residents to hang out for a bit of a chat.

With almost 30 of us working we made great progress and we're hoping to get back and continue working on the space later in the Spring so it will be fun to watch the project develop.

With such a short run it was great to have Danica step up and volunteer to lead a longer run back and there seemed to be plenty of folks who were happy to join her. Thanks Danica - and well done to all of you for taking on Constitution Hill and the Zig Zag on the way back to base.

Thanks also to Danica and Matthew for back marking today, to Fi for helping me carry a few tools and Paul for services to health and safety.