What's in a name? (pt1)

The charity thing, the bicycle thing, the route thing and all those kind of things were all in the bag. It was Phil's original idea and planning, but once we had bought into the idea, the rest like training, bikes, equipment, etc, were not issues, with one exception.

More after the jump...
We had ridden together over the last 8 months, there have been some lows but there have been a lot more highs. We hate to admit it, but we have become better friends because of this cycling business. Although we still fall out (well Phil and I do) it only takes a few miles and a few bouts of banter to make things alright with the world again.

During this time, my love for cycling was really starting to grow and two things struck me about our weekly rides. Firstly we were riding as more than just friends, we were riding as a team and secondly, I thought we should be wearing kit to suit the task. As it was for charity and I would be taking photographs, I thought it made sense if we wore similar colours, team colours. This led to the idea of cycling in proper jerseys, so I had look at the cost of custom jerseys.  I showed my findings to the team and we voted it in.

We knew weren't going to be sponsored by the Murdoch Group nor a Taiwanese mobile phone company, so we needed something to put on them, otherwise they would be blank. What is the point of a custom jersey that is blank when there are hundreds of off the shelf ones in the right colours. So we needed a team name to emblazon on it, which neither screamed chainganger or was some awful attempt at being funny. Something neither too serious or too laid-back. It also had to be original, it couldn’t be cheesy, it had to be related to bikes, it had to be this that .......... so and so forth.

To say we spent some time discussing the team name is probably an understatement. 30 emails, a list of 50 names (none of which we used), 3 one hour long meetings, probably 10 cups of tea and 1 posh coffee. We still hadn't decided. 

So we said “enough is enough” and one Sunday we piled around Phil's house, sorted out all the important issues in the first ten minutes and then we spent the next seventy minutes brainstorming team names.

Suffice to say these are some of the ones that didn't make the cut.

• Team Thames
• Thames Team
• Party of Four
• Riders of Rivers (a bit specific)
• Pedal Oh Dear
• Wheels In Motion
• Tyred Bikes
• Tyred Riders
• Wheely Tyred
• Wheels Around the World/England/Britain
• Saddled Up
• TRCBR 

The one team name that did, is going straight onto the jersey and we like it, which is all that matters.

Peace Out My Good People
Andrew