Monday 9 January 2012

"Hi old Friend . . .it's been a while!"

Don't worry, we haven't left you. Quite the contrary, lots has been going on over the final months of 2011. The team has been working hard training, building a better profile, networking to find major sponsors and donations, developing routes for the bike ride, looking at venues and track for the night ride and much more.

John Cook and myself turned out for the first team challenge on boxing day  . .well he watched! I clowned around in the water for ten minutes dressed as Ali G and made 50 quid for the charity - nice one! Seems the boys with the riding legs are ok with the intense 24hrs of bike pain, but may be a little temperature sensitive lol!

So we hit the end of 2011 on a good note, we are a healthy team full of determined individuals who all bring something special to the project. We will find out more on Wednesday evening when we get together for our first official meeting and pull together all the little strings of the project. I'll let you know how we get on.

2012 . . . are you ready for us? . . . . .I hope so. Bring on H.E.T!!!!

Monday 21 November 2011

Jim 'Fixes it!' from beyond the grave!

Dear Jim,

Can you fix it for me to have a charity event that is filled with generous people and goes without a hitch, a 24hr cycling marathon with ten amazing people (that all come home safely), a support team to cater to their every whim, and smash a fund raising target of £4000 for the Butterwick Children's hospice?

Well, sir Jimmy is a pretty chilled out geezer and he's helping us step by step. With the help of his little elves, he's delivered everything we have asked for so far and I'm sure he'll keep supporting us in his big golden shell suit in the sky!

We've got a start venue, we've got a cycle route, we've got a party venue, we've got 10 riders, we've got everything we need for the party night, we've got some support from various companies which will help the riders, and we've got many other things in the pipe line including team clothing, and equipment.

The next few big things are; creating maximum exposure by doing a few hours on rollers in public places with a banner and a bucket (got a couple of places in mind!), hitting local businesses, for steam sponsorship, raffle prizes and donations to the just giving, and 10x rollers/turbos/static bikes!

It's all good in the hood and we are making definite strides in the right direction.

 . . . Dear sir Jimmy,if you could keep fixing it for us we would be much obliged.

Maffyou
Age 9

Saturday 12 November 2011

" . . .erm, sure I've forgotten something . . . .Aargh! Start training!"

So, if we have a charity, we have a target (£4000), we have enough riders, we have both venues required and we have a route in the planning, surely that's everything? So, we can sit back and relax, safe in the knwoledge that people like Dawn McManus of Red Dreams, Victoria Rogers of Butterwick and Yvonne Tindale of Sound Solutions UK, will have everything sorted and the endurance event on 12th May will go off without a hitch! Right lads I'm off to hibernate this winter, I'll see you all in May sometime. . . . .got a feeling I'm forgetting something?

Aaaaarrrgh! Two very important things! We all need to be fit enough to complete the challenge especially when I say I'm really expecting 350 plus miles from every rider (not to much I hope?) and we need to RAISE FOUR GRAND CASH as well. No pressure, but the latter is kind of the whole point. So now the foundation is in place, we hammer the other two.

We raise our game with the training, motivate and push each other along, teach each other with our own mistakes and share good practice and build in a safe and positive way together. We also need to start robbing banks, selling our families heirlooms and . . you only need one kidney!?!*

The gates are open boys, first one to raise £500 gets a free pen and and I'm calling the 'Petrofac Thistle's' donation so I'm on £300 already!!!!!

Sleep no longer exists, family are but a distant memory and who needs a career ( my wife is not in the room as I type this!).

I think we can all have Christmas Day off though lol!!!!

Oh and 'Dear Santa, we really need some rollers!".

Tuesday 8 November 2011

Bit More Publicity & A Few Good Memories

Today our internal comms manager at work asked me to provide a few photos for an article she is doing about HET in our work newsletter that has a circulation not just in Sunderland but in Newcastle, Bradford and branches nationwide.

Scrabbling to meet the deadline I dug out a few from my BlackBerry and in my horror when I got home and looked at them on full screen and saw they were all ones of me lycra clad (the least flattering material for a man of my BMI) apart from two, one of which shows me beating Matthew Turnbull in a race........





......OK, OK before Matt starts burning up the keyboard I'll come clean.  The race was about 45 seconds old and it was our 2011 debut in the Burn Road Harriers Old Monks Race.  The older chap I'm overtaking is a guy called Vaughan Godber who did something similar to what we intend to do next year in the past in running the Coast to Coast.

If our training for the 2012 Challenges is even halfway as funny and mad as the night time training session Matt and I enjoyed last January when we, undeterred by the dark and the snow and the ice and the mud decided to recce the Old Monk Course navigated by a route I'd downloaded to my BlackBerry from my Garmin.  I'd actually run the route with a friend about a month earlier and recorded it on the Garmin then went straight out on the drink and lost about 80% of my recollection of that day, hence the requirement to re-familiarise myself.

Headtorches (and torches stolen from infant children), warm dayglo gear, getting lost in the woods and Matt suspsciously running a lot faster through the Monk Heseldon Cemetery were the order of the evening.

Bring on some more crazy training sessions!

Monday 7 November 2011

Ultra Riders Overdose on Fructose!

I've been a busy bee and started an organised plan to minimise individual costs to those who participate in the endurance events for the team. I'm in the process of sending begging letters to subsidise the following areas of the challenges.

  • Nutrition and hydration
  • Team Clothing
  • Raffle prizes
  • Race related items (shoes, socks, shorts, bike accessories and perishables)
  • Race fees
  • Advertising donation
  • Charity donations
Today I've picked off all the leading brands of nutrition suppliers and hopefully at least one will take pity on us and bung a few gels, bars or drinks our way. Here's today's nutrition hit list.

ZipVits, Shotz, Go SiS, High5, Power Bar, NUUN, Clif Bar, Squashy Sports, GU, Mule Bar, Hammer, Crank Sports and Lucosade! . . .if we get something from them all, we'll be well sorted!

So we're slowly hitting the places that need to be hit and the lads will all hammer things from their ends as well. We've also got Paul Godley of Godley's cycles on side who is willing to support in whatever way he can and will look to sorting us out with some bits and bobs and possibly a raffle prize! But more importantly, he's a guy who's done this stuff before, lead and organised events and knows people who know people . . a very useful geezer to know! Think that deserves his company logo on the blog and web for definate. Plus he sorted me out with an awesome new Orbea Onix for an unbelievable price! I'll post a picture of that soon as well lol!


Saturday 5 November 2011

Enter The (Fat) Dragon

OK - It's time someone else posted other than Matt.  Not that we don't all enjoy Matts musings but it's Saturday afternoon, I've now officially retired from rugby so I'm bored and am flicking between the online coverage of Ironman Florida and Facebook.

This challenge for me probably carries a number of different aspects to other people in the group.  For a start I'm a relative newbie to multisport having completed Stokesleey Duathlon last March and done nothing since.

Running long distances holds no fear for me, I'm a plodder and my favourite distance is half marathon but what has become apparent since I set my personal best of 1h:32m:06 in 1995 is that I have got fat, not just tubby but proper fat.  At 5 stone 7" and 15 stone my knees kindly reminded me that if I'm going to f*** about running further than 20 miles in one go they are going to complain about it, loudly, more loudly than a drunk fishwife who's just been queuejumped at a Take That concert.

So first challenge along with getting the time on the road in is to drop some weight.  Having got down to just over 14 stone I think I need to go a bit further and get to maybe 12 stone or so.

Second challenge is to speed up a bit so that I'm not plodding 20 miles behind everyone else.

Third challenge is to get my shoulder, the reason for the retirement from rugby into a fit state for swimming in time for Stockton triathlon in August.  By swimming I also need to mean moving through the water faster than a baby elephant with concrete shoes on too.

Still things are looking up, I've clocked 6 hours a week training in the last 2 weeks, I feel good even this early in the base phase and I'm looking forward to getting through the winter and coming out the other side a bit leaner and faster and ready to smash a few races.

James

Friday 4 November 2011

Ingredients for a 24hr - 300 mile bike ride.

My shopping bag won't fit this lot, so I'm hoping some of the other lads are going to nip into the 'Endurance Ride' super market and pick up some things . . .preferably fro free!


  1. 1 x Community room to start the challenge
  2. 10 x Training rollers or turbo trainers
  3. 10 x Team race clothing - Tee - shirts (with sponsorship adverts)
  4. 1 x Safety car + driver for road leg of race
  5. Assortment of sponsors to advertise (any donation for web and blog but £50 for tTee-shirts and banner?)
  6. 240 x 500ml bottles of sports replacement drinks
  7. 240 x Energy gels (Glucose/fructose)
  8. Assortment of bananas, flap jacks and chocolates
  9. Assorted replacement bike parts, inner tubes or spare bike for safety car
  10. A few multi frequency HH radios
  11. 10x local inflammatory gels (volterol)
  12. 10x travel size E45 cream
  13. Assorted first aid equipment and materials
  14. 1 x account to deposit donations it that can only be accessed by more than one team member
  15. Assorted monitory donations from local businesses to offset costs for riders (hopefully £200/300 should cover everything and ensure that riders do not incur personal costs
  16. 500/1000 A4 paper and envelopes for letters and promotion
  17. Printing costs for literature and letters
  18. Assorted raffle prizes (as many as possible and wide ranging)
I'm sure this is only the start of the list of things we need, but i know that we have a team of people that will make it happen. The face book page has been a great forum and we all talk pretty much every day and tell each other what, we're doing, what we've done and the developments we've made. 

All good in the hood!!!