Fundraising update

First £1,000 raised at the JustGiving site.

Now it's getting proper serious.

(And if you haven't done your bit yet - you know what to do!)

No such thing as bad publicity

Someone thought it would be a good idea to mention our quest on the company-wide intranet. Apparently, pictures speak louder than words:

(From left: Richard F, Mike W, Tom W, Phil S, Ian H, Neil B, Greg R, Andy D)

The words spoken by this picture include:"don't put the fat guy on the bike."

There's nothing quite like looking like an eedjit in front of 1300 colleagues to concentrate the mind.

Which end has the handlebars?

Greg, not being in possession of a suitable bike, has borrowed Rob's second one.

I'll say that again. Rob's second bike. Rob has one road racing bike. And another one. He's like that.

By all accounts, according to Greg, this is a highly-strung thoroughbred of a machine. It bears some similarities with bikes Greg has known. In that there's a wheel at each end. But the brakes are somewhere completely random, and you have to wear special shoes that clip straight onto the pedal arrangement. A Raleigh Chopper it is not.

Greg is scared of his bike.

Driving ambition

A quick word about the non-cycling members of the team. At the beginning of all this I volunteered to drive, on the basis that any attempt to cycle would end up with me in Casualty in about five minutes flat.

Some people claim that their bodies are temples. Mine's a medieval cathedral. Behold my flying buttresses.

Anyway, at the time the job of driver seemed to be an easy option. Sitting on my backside for five days, piloting a bunch of sweaty cyclists from one end of the country to the other. Hours of relative boredom, interspersed by the odd pie.

But the plan requires pin-point accuracy, timing, navigational and organisation skills. Get the changeover points wrong, for instance, and we'll never make our schedule. And I don't think our employer will be too chuffed if we're still out doing this seven days later, somehow.

This might be why no-one's volunteered to drive the other two support vehicles yet.

Gentlemen, draw your lots

This is quite important. Deciding who goes in each time. We need to consider the personal attributes of each team member. The right personal chemistry.

And, most important, whether your musical tastes match.

So we used science. OK, we actually used scraps of paper and a hat.

Team 1

Neil B
Ian H
Richard F

Driver - to be advised

Team 2

James W
Greg R
Jeremy C

Driver - to be advised

Team 3

Andy D
Tom W
Rob L

Driver - Phil S

No-one escapes - biogs will be published soon.

All the gear, no idea

We've got a good number of volunteers. Pretty close to the nine we need, actually. But all of them blokes, it has to be said. There are several reasons for this:

• That whole "sharing a hotel room thing" was never going to be that appealing
• Men tend to have a malfunctioning common-sense circuit

I got the cyclists to send their details in so we could keep track of things. All I got was a list of blokey nick-names together with a litany of all the gadgets they could bring; bikes, satnavs, iPhones, weird cycling gadgets involving funny shoes and drinking tubes.

This was, for some reason, hilarious to the ladies in the office.

We could well be the most well-equipped team ever to crash and burn in Cornwall after six hours.

Oh blimey..

We've had our first donation at the JustGiving Site.

Real money has been donated. Suppose we'd better crack on and do this, then.

Team building

For this to work we're going to have to have teams within a team. (Is 'sub-team' a real word? Didn't think so). So we need nine riders. Not quite there yet, but there's plenty of time.

Slowly, but surely, people are getting on board. The weekly(ish) meetings are beginning to make sense. We're starting to think about things like:

• Route - what's the best way to do this? Obviously we can't use busy roads if people are cycling - especially during the night - but we do need to keep it direct if we can.
  
• Stopping-off points - between riders and then between teams.
• Hotels - this is still a point of contention. Some people want to keep this as low-key as possible, with camping being discussed. Other people (we'll call them 'sensible people', shall we?) say that this is a silly idea. Long-lost contacts at at hotel chains are being dug out.
• Bikes - now this may sound daft. But at least one rider doesn't actually have a bike. Which could be interesting.

We've started to think about publicity. At the end of the day, the whole purpose of this is to raise oodles of cash for a good cause. So people need to know about it. JustGiving, here we come...

Taking shape

The route is beginning to look right. Starting at 6.00am on a Friday at Land's End (most end-to-enders do it this way as the prevailing winds are at your back). By sundown on Friday we'll be somewhere around Bristol, maybe into Gloucestershire.

Saturday sees us heading straight up England, running parallel to the Welsh border and making for the Lake District. With the quieter roads in Scotland we should be at JOG by the end of Sunday.

Of course, there's no actual stopping as such. Someone's going to be cycling at any time throughout the day. There will be hotel rooms at three locations, which we'll swap between teams. The concept of hot bunking has been discussed.

Apparently, it's all the rage in the submarine service.

Any takers?

So far we haven't quite got everyone we need, if the plan is to succeed. Unless people are going to agree to do a lot more cycling than is practical. Or healthy, for that matter.

So the word is going out. People are looking at their colleagues in a whole new way. "Do you think so-and-so would be up for it? They look vaguely fit."

There's now a small group of us meeting up once a week to agree a plan and think about who else we can drag into this. Things are changing fast.