London 2012 blog

Lots of team days/events/things come and go and you find yourself thinking, here we go again. Our team building event at the weekend has quite happily changed my mind. We had temps to cover the reception, we had tickets and lots of energy and we were ready to go to St Pancras by 12 noon!

A pleasant journey up to be had gazing at some beautiful english countryside relaxed us nicely. We all got together in the evening for our team dinner to set out our plans for the next day and have a team ice breaker with some fun 'truth' questions put to us anonymously by others. This was a great way to see how team mates viewed each other.
Next day in the lobby and we were getting excited….time to go to Holme Pierrepoint in Nottingham which is home to the National Rafting Centre, a simple 15 minute taxi ride from the centre of town. Once we arrived, it was quite a quick process, get our wetsuits, get a quick briefing and off we go down the rapids! You go down the rapids 4 times but what we did not count on was having to get out at the bottom, carry our boat quite a distance back up the bank and then jumping in again and paddling all the way back to the start!

As our team is quite big we had 2 dinghies and were split between them, Gary our boss was our spectator and cameraman. Each run down the rapids got steadily harder as we tried different approaches and ways including of all things, standing up and surfing down! I think this is a great way to show how you can look at the same task and approach it in different ways but still reach the end and get a good result.

One by one, we all took our turns to fall out of the boats and have to get dragged back in rather an undignified way. By the 4th and final run though, I had yet to fall out and was feeling rather smug, I quite happily told my team-mates this also which I think made them dream of ways to get me out. Our instructors though unknown to us were planning to tip us all out, Gary had been told this and knew where to stand for the best shots. Both boats in turn hit the first hurdle and both times, the instructor kindly helped it tip over to allow us all to spill out and get washed away.



At the end of the morning, we were rather achy and tired but we all had a lovely lunch in town to share others thoughts on the day and then grabbed 40 winks on the way back home. On the way back to London I thought to myself how Broxbourne would be during the Olympics and how in creating a new facility, we will have a great legacy venue on our hands.

Me and all of the others had a wonderful weekend and felt it really brought us together as a team and allowed us all to play to our strengths. We all had to pull together as a team to achieve good results and be able to keep our heads above even the choppiest of waters. If we can translate this in to our every day work life at LOCOG offices, I am sure we will all manage to stage the best Games ever. Between us all over this weekend, I think we proved to ourselves why we are LOCOG Team of the Year 2008 (as voted by our fellow staff members)!