Accenture was the latest company to choose Yew’s performance tops for their corporate adventures.  Accenture’s JP Morgan Chase Corporate Challenge team were all wearing 100% recycled running tops in Battersea Park on July 8th. They were pleased to be able to get a sustainable solution for the team shirts – opting for our lightweight short sleeve Everywear performance tops.  It was hot hot hot in London that night, and there seemed to be a cloud of dust following all the runners on the grass in the park.  All the parks in London seem to have gone a bit more yellow than green with  all this heat and no rain – you’ve got to laugh when you realise that you’re living in London and hoping for rain!

We recently did a charity walk in the South Downs for the Child Welfare Scheme, a Nepal charity that we like. You can find out more about them on our People Yew Like page (http://www.yewclothing.com/community/people-yew-like).  As it was ‘just a walk’ (and incidentally, the event was called ‘Just Walk‘) we didn’t really prepare that well.  There was a training walk of about 30km (all pretty flat) so we thought that it would be moderately challenging.  Jun had previously done a 50 mile walk and was confident that 60 km wouldn’t be that difficult in comparison (he may have forgotten to add the aging factor in, since his 50 mile walk was done in 1995).  All those ultramarathon runners out there may laugh at a 60k walk, but it really was a long way. And a bit hilly too.

For pictures from the walk, go to our Gallery page – http://www.yewclothing.com/downloads/gallery/

We started at about 8.30 in the morning from Goodwood race course: all smiles and full of tea and bacon rolls.  For the next few hours there were quite a lot of people around.  We didn’t really head off that quickly, but just tried to keep an even pace up.  The weather was awesome, so we were feeling pretty good.  And after finding some gorgeous woods full of bluebelled carpets, we were liking our nature walk.

Then came Arundel Castle – which is rather nice, but also at the top of a hill – and we were definitely starting to feel the legs.  Knee problems, groin strains and puffy ankles were starting to niggle at Team Yew, but there was a tea break at the top of another hill, at which point the sun disappeared and the wind picked up – giving us a rather cold and gloomy rest by this turret:

Fortunately, down the other side it was all sunshine and lush again. Oh, and then another hill as well.

The amazing thing about this tour of the South Downs was that we got to see so many things. We had woodland, rivers, chalk cliffs, castles, lots of hills, muddy marshland (apparently of great significance – but we didn’t stop to read the sign).  By the time we set off from our dinner stop, we were ready to finish and have it all done with. We’d picked up a lone straggler from another group and walked the remaining miles with her in tow.  There was a slight dip in morale when we realised that some of the distance markers near the finish were slightly out (making us think we had less to go than we did) and also the fact that they shoved a big hill right before the finish at Goodwood.  Fortunately, a few pear drops solved that.

By the time we got to the finish at 9pm, the sun was dipping down.  We were rewarded with shortbread at the finish (though a beer would have gone down quite well).

We’ve just finished the London Marathon Expo where we got to speak to loads of runners from different backgrounds. We met one of the only people to have done every London Marathon since it was founded in 1981. He told me there are 25 of them left and one of them is still under 50 – and still under 2 hours. Pretty amazing stuff.

We also got to meet Tristan Miller, who’s running 52 Marathons in 52 weeks all over the world. He’s doing it to raise money for UNICEF – which Jun worked at for a year, so he has a soft spot for them. You can check out his website at RunLikeCrazy.com.  We gave him some free clothes to help him on his epic journey (see below…Tristan’s on the right, and you can see the reflective print on our everywear tops working well too!).

We are very happy to be a sponsor of the East Grinstead Triathlon Club’s 25^th Anniversary Race and the official provider of race shirts. On the 16^th May the race promises to be a great event – it’s completely full (even the waiting list!) and we particularly like that there is a special event for novices to try triathlon for the first time.

It’s all in aid of the Prostate Cancer Charity and Yew Clothing and East Grinstead Tri Club will be donating money to them from every race shirt sold.

The race shirts are made from Yew’s favourite lightweight and fast wicking fabric that’s also made from recycled plastic bottles – a great choice for both performance and sustainability. See our special East Grinstead commemorative race designs here.

Lots of us go running with headphones and music. I sometimes do when I run on my own. The right music can really motivate you, put you in the right mood and distract you from the hard work – making your workout that much better and enjoyable.  Music can effectively reduce your perception of how hard you’re working.  Some people love running to a certain beat.  Haile Gebrselassie famously trains to Scatman because the tempo of the song fits with his world record pace.  Maybe you just need to find the right track…

Many gym goers can’t live without music or the tv  going as they crank out their time on the treadmill or bike.  It’s easy to understand that since you’re not going anywhere – you really do want something to distract you.

However, there is a flip side. My running club has a specific policy against runners wearing headphones during club runs.  Why?  The gentle reason is that it’s anti-social. The serious reason is that a few years ago one of our runners was hit by a car and broke his leg – he was the only one in the group listening to music and the only one that didn’t stop as they were halfway across a road (presumably because everyone else heard or saw something, but he was distracted).  Likewise, at athletics matches, you’re not supposed to wear headphones while on the track or field – you might not hear the warning horn go before the javelin starts to fly towards you…

So when I heard about this story on the radio, I figured it was worth sharing. Let’s hope that there aren’t many airplanes crashing where you go running but, it turns out, you can’t be too careful.

42 Floors of running can have a strange effect on you. For me, it involved crawling around on all fours, unable to talk.  Whilst on the floor (of the top floor in Tower42), the one thing I noticed was the building going up next door that was even taller than Tower42 – which I’d just raced up. My thought was – I wonder if they’re going to move the race over there when it’s done.

Well, we made it up: Dominic got up in 6.48 and I was 11 seconds behind him at 6.59. In the process we raised over £500 for Shelter, received bruises from elbows in the stairwell, got sore legs and won ourselves the best view in the city.

After bumping into Dom’s friend (and stand-up comic), David Whitney, we all retired for a celebratory drink at their friend’s wine bar – Planet of the Grapes.  I can highly recommend both.

Here are some photos

We’ve donated some of our clothes for a charity auction run by Trail Magazine.

You can see their auction on ebay here.

All proceeds from the auction will go to Community Action Nepal to help build a much-needed rescue shelter at 4750m in the remote Himalayan valley of Gokyo. This will help to save the lives of trekking porters when they are caught out in bad weather. www.canepal.org.uk

It’s been a while since I’ve done something silly for charity, so here’s this year’s. A friend and I have decided to run up 42 floors to the top of Tower 42 in London as part of an event organised by Shelter. It’s a short challenge – let’s hope it takes less than 10 minutes – but the burn on those legs is going to be interesting. And by interesting, I mean really painful.

All in a good cause – and, of course, Yew will be kitting out the team for the challenge.

If you’d like to join us on this challenge, we’re putting together a team. Everyone has to do all the floors, and will have to raise money for Shelter. We’ll support the team with free kit for everyone. If you’re interested, email us at info@yewclothing.com

We have always thought that we should really get certain things right from the start.  Well, one thing we didn’t make a decision on was what charities we were going to support. To be fair, we had an idea – you can see some of the causes we have already supported on this website. But it was the commitment going forward that we hadn’t agreed on. Not that there was any resistance to the idea – the founders sat round a table and all agreed that it would absolutely be something we were going to do – but we were too busy trying to get product sorted out, which we hoped would lead to some sales, and THEN we’d have the issue of what to do with some profits.

Well, Kresse’s involved in the launch of a new climate change charity, and Yew are almost certainly going to be a part of that (not surprisingly), but Jun’s being playing around with other ideas from the start. Should we give a proportion of profits (it’s a good way to ensure we don’t give money away unless we can afford it) or a proportion of sales (tougher commitment)?  Well, we figured the way to do it would be to bite the bullet and just say we WILL commit to supporting certain charities. As such, we’ve recently submitted an application to join 1% For The Planet - http://www.onepercentfortheplanet.org. Through this we can support environmental charities – we HAVE to support them. 1% of our sales each year will go towards this. After that, if we want to continue to support top flight (non-environmental) causes through Kiva or like CWS Nepal (see People Yew like), then that’ll be separate.  Hopefully this is a good thing, we’re saying we’re committed to being a responsible company and we’ll sign a contract to bind us into that commitment.

For those of you that think Switzerland is just full of uptight bankers and other financiers, try spending an evening at Freestyle – an extreme sports festival on the lake in Zurich, and nestled up by the headquarters of several major insurance companies.  Freestyle is all about skateboarding, free skiing and snowboarding and something they were calling FMX – presumably freestyle motocross.  The weekend was a program of competitions, showcasing some pretty amazing athletes doing gravity defying tricks. The event has a 32m high ski ramp, leading down to a kicker – it’s pretty big when you see it in real life.  The guys were bombing it down and pulling big air, rotating this way and that. It’s got to get you excited about the winter season.

I’d not seen the FMX before, and to be fair, I wasn’t so impressed with the stinky diesel coming out of their bikes, but I was blown away by some of the stuff these guys did. You’ve got to reckon that bike they’re spinning around weighs a fair bit – I saw one guy launch off the ramp and push his back wheel round so it was facing the way he was going, before yanking the whole thing back and landing – another guy took off and fully let go of his bike, flying like superman, before grabbing it back and safely nailing the landing.

I found this website with some freeze-frame pictures of some of the performances at the event: Panorama Journal. Pretty cool.

We were over at Freestyle promoting our brand at the stand of our friends, Disaster Industries.  These guys make beautiful custom snowboards and skateboards from wood. They’re works of art. The Disaster guys make boards for grown ups (a custom board is like a bespoke suit – expensive), so compared to many of the other stands at the event, they seemed a little mismatched to the majority of the visitors – who were teens, sporting what on of the Disaster boys was calling ‘no style’ fashion. You know, bright coloured hoodies and trousers big enough to fit a family in.

All the kids wanted free stickers, free flyers, free whatever – as long as it was free. By the time they hit the next stand, half of what they’d picked up was on the floor. It was crazy, after a couple of hours the floor would be covered with waste paper. People weren’t dropping rubbish like food or stuff like that – nope, just flyers, stickers and anything that they’d picked up for free and discarded. It was, I have to say shocking. One of our Swiss hosts said – “it’s not very swiss, eh?” Not quite, no.

Having said that, there were some positive differences from other similar sized day festivals I’d been to (think those big all day concerts in Hyde Park).  For one thing, the fast food on sale was remarkably good.  And the toilets were clean. I was also impressed with a bottle collection scheme they were running. Whenever you bought a drink, it was expensive – about £3 for a soft drink – but you were given a little plastic token and when you returned the empty bottle you got about £1.20 back (making the drink a more reasonable price). I did laugh to myself that it was a good idea as I picked my way through the mountains of waste paper.

Freestyle’s an awesome event, but I’m glad they’re thinking about sustainability for next year. I met the consultant tasked with bringing it to the show next year. She’s got a big task ahead of her when you consider that two of the event’s main draws are a massive snow ramp built in the warmth of late summer, and a bunch of crazy FMX daredevils burning fuel to do backflips.  But hopefully she can sort out something with all that paper for starters.