As luck would have it, Adrian was one of the 30 BT employees chosen to take part in the challenge of a lifetime, and in March 1995 training began in earnest. Along with his fellow employees, Adrian found himself in Plymouth on board one of the 67 foot BT Global Challenge training yachts. His introduction to the BT Global Challenge was something of a rude awakening; on his first trip to his cabin, Adrian was surprised to discover cotton buds and moisturiser in the storage packets on the wall. The realisation dawned that there were no segregated cabins, and that he would be sharing the rather cramped living space with two female colleagues......

For the first couple of weeks, Adrian and the other BT staff trained as a separate group, but after this they were assigned to individual yachts and integrated with other crew volunteers. Alliances and allegiances started to change; 'I began to feel that I was first and foremost a Concert crew member rather than a BT employee', said Adrian, 'It became really important to devote my time and energy to the team effort, and I suppose this was when I started to understand the true spirit of the race.'

The group of 30 BT leggers continued training through the spring and summer, holding down their jobs during the week and then spending weekends away from home, learning the basics of seamanship. In April, Adrian ran the London Marathon to raise the money he had pledged to the Save The Children Fund, and as the race start drew nearer, he began to prepare for the five month period that he would be spending out of the office. Fortunately, Adrian's boss was understanding and supportive of his involvement in what is effectively BT's largest ever relationship marketing project, and his workload was redistributed amongst other employees.

Adrian continued his training with the other Concert crew members over the summer, and as in any group, there were contentious issues that had to be negotiated. Before Concert set sail from Southampton, her skipper and crew had a discussion about tricky situations that might arise at sea, and they decided as a group how they would handle these. For example, it was agreed that relationships between crew members on the same yacht were best avoided if at all possible (although Chris Tibbs remarked, 'it's pretty difficult to legislate against this type of thing'). Definite no-nos on board Concert include being late to watch duty, and hogging food; everything has to be shared equally between the crew, and favourite foods are often divided up into minute portions so that everyone can have a share.

Although sailing a yacht might not seem at fist glance to be much of an exercise in teamwork, Adrian has found that it is in fact very good training for building and managing groups of people. As he explains, 'all manoeuvres on deck require teamwork. Each person within the crew has a role to play and a specific task to perform, but we all come together to achieve a manoeuvre. With crew positioned at the mast, bow and cockpit, clear and effective communications are vital if we are to work together properly, and obviously it's important that each person is supported and encouraged by the other members of the team, even if the job goes wrong !'.