Tonight twelve runners took the short run to one of our favourite local tasks. Why our favourite? Well it definitely has nothing to do with the free cakes on offer! We've been going to the Community Kitchen run by the Brighton and Hove Food Partnership since the kitchen began and they are always ready with some great cleaning tasks to get the kitchen ready for classes.

Amaryllis and Rosie set to the tough but rewarding job of bringing the ovens back to life, it was a grease ridden nightmare but they made them look fantastic by the end.

Jane started the evening in horror at the scale of mis matched utensils in cupboards, after calming down she soon made light work of the mess!

Fresh from their Worthing half-marathon heroics Angela and Ben polished up the dining table and chairs.

The rest of us busied ourselves with general cleaning around the kitchen until the whole place was sparkling! For all our hard work we were rewarded with some amazing cakes.

It was lovely to see some old faces tonight and big thank you to Frances for sharing the tasks around us all.

Six Good Gym runners helped local volunteers with setting up and running Spring in the Patch community festival. It was luckily mainly a dry April day for set-up until about half way through the event when it started raining unfortunately. Juliet (who is also a Patch volunteer committee member) ran the community mission. Sarah and Pippa helped with set-up which involved putting up tents, carrying boxes from the container, setting up the bar and tea tent. Sarah came back for another volunteer shift later collecting donations on the gate, the innovation of being able to now take card donations has really helped. Nikki and Michael joined later too for different shifts, both on the tea tent serving tea, coffee, cold drinks and a range of home-made delicious cakes. The event attracted about 300 people and had four bands, bar, tea tent, a range of stalls including craft, hair braiding, face painting, Green party, Labour party and activities such as yoga and archery. We event had a potential MP volunteering on the bar! It was a very successful event, despite the rain and the Good Gym volunteers made a big difference.

A group of Good-Gymers jogged two miles up an incline to Cardinal Newman School. Meeting the rest of the group there! After we found the entrance we were met by the care taker Pedro who showed us the school gym which needed cleaning. We welcomed two new members Olivia and Hannah and welcomed back Daniela who quickly got stuck in.

Looking at the school website we were in the St Augustine Building which also has a climbing wall - a nice one to discover next time!

We donned gloves and got to wiping and dusting the pretty dusty gym equipment. Some of us who were good at multi tasking managed to use the running machines and clean! We had fun on the balance board. We were impressed with their moto use your muscles not your mouth although we definitely used both!

After we finished up we jogged up a hill to The Dyke Alehouse to enjoy a drink and some chips. Nice meeting here Lucia too!

Brighthelm Centre is a well-established community venue situated in the heart of Brighton. Our first ever beneficiary charitable organisation, a short run from our meeting point at the Victoria Statue in Brighton.

GoodGym’s call today was to make the space much nicer for its community groups and tenants, and so we did by tuning our GoodGym steps with the Zumba choreography of ZumbaWithMon Class, which is on here every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday!

We tackled the centre’s stairwells with a double GoodGym action: by deep cleaning the steps and making the windows shined top down and bottom up, and vice versa.

Nice bumping in the musicians from Water Bear College of Music and other community groups who were busy in the rooms upstairs. This gave me a sense of belonging to all those organisations that we serve with our active GoodGym volunteering work. And, it just keeps resonating a mutual devotion for each other community charitable mission, and enduring respect for all the diversity, time and energy that we all donate while contributing towards a greater Good in our city. This is Active Kindness, among each other and all.

Today we kept our running short to rest (a bit) our legs prior a busy four sessions on this weekend, 24-25th February. Click here to sign up on what’s on in Brighton area.

Brighton GoodGym-ers will be volunteering and/or running at our local parkruns and at the Brighton Half to embrace our cause while engaging our hearts in memory of some fellow GoodGym-ers. We are also fundraising for Mind.