Archive for September, 2011

We flew back from Ireland on Monday morning having been there for the start of the Race Around Ireland on Sunday evening, which Carvalho Custom has sponsored. And here we are on Friday afternoon and the solo riders are still racing, with over 1500 kms cycling in their legs and less than 15 hours sleep over the 5 days and still going. To think that these riders have barely got off their bikes over all this time makes you realise the enormity of their achievement.

So you might be expecting these heroes of endurance cycling to be brash or full of themselves given the fact that they are some of the most amazing athletes on the planet; but having met them at the pre-race meetings, I was really struck by how humble and down-to-earth they all seemed. It made me think, that anyone who has had to face up to the unthinkable depths of suffering that ultra endurance racing involves, is bound to be humbled by it.

Here is Nicole from Carvalho Custom presenting the RAI jersey to 2009 winner, Joe Barr:

This is not a sport for the insecure – it takes enormous strength of character to deal with the sleep deprivation, exhaustion and pain and the people who do it are giants, but they must feel so small in the face of the magnitude of their task and it makes you respect them all the more for it.

We have just come back from Navan in Ireland where we attended the start of the epic Race Around Ireland cycle race. It is an Ultra Marathon race, which means riding 2172 kms in a continuous race (so if you sleep, you lose time) and they are looking to finish in less than 5 days.

We were delighted to be given the opportunity to sponsor the custom cycling jerseys for the riders and here is Nicole and Charlie from Carvalho Custom with some of the competitors, wearing the jerseys we supplied.

And here is Charlie watching the start in his Carvalho Custom jersey and arm warmers, although he couldn’t be convinced to race this year, citing a chronic fear of suffering.

And who could forget the RAI mascot, faithfully wearing his mini Race Around Ireland jersey! Best of luck to all the competitors and congratulations to the organising team for putting on such a fantastic event and making us feel so welcome!

We keep on trying to improve things here at Carvalho Custom to make things easier for our clients, so we have brought out a new excel order form that will allow the person who puts the order together for a club to easily add together all the individual orders received from club members.

So the idea is that the club clothing administrator will receive a load of orders from club members, which s/he will input one by one into our new order form; then when this is finished, s/he presses a button and all the individual orders are added together to make a total club order, which can then be emailed to us to produce. The order form can also be used in the traditional way of just inputting a total order for a club or organisation – the system is just more user-friendly than a standard order form and it will automatically calculate the final price for you based on the total quantities ordered.

So the order form performs three roles – it provides a convenient way of recording the individual orders of club members, it saves you the hassle of having to consolidate the individual orders into a total order and it will automatically calculate the final total price and the price for each individual. You can download the new order form here (please make sure you activate the macro when you start, by clicking on the option when prompted – you will get a security warning when you do this, but it is completely safe!).

When you download the order form (it is in excel), the first thing you should do (once you have activated the macro) is to click on the instructions button, although it should be reasonably self-explanatory. You can click on the red triangles scattered round the order form for further instructions.

Essentially the way it works is that you first select the items that you intend to order, then you can choose either input the total club order in one go, or you can input all the individual orders from the club using the ‘Add Multiple Orders’ button . You then just hit the ‘Calculate Total Price’ button and the program will finish off the order form for you.

This is a new system for us and we are sure to need to make some changes, so please let us know what you think!