Friday marked something a little bit different for the mark-making* team: a day of fresh air and team building activities with charity the Adventure Plus. It isn’t uncommon for the mention of a team building day to conjure images of gruelling boot camp scenarios where lugging huge water bottles around a field is considered a warm-up, and we weren’t helped by the fact the day’s activities were being kept highly secretive. Thankfully for everyone, the day turned out to be enormous fun, even for those not as fit and sports-mad as Ali.

Adventure Plus is a charity that uses adventure and outdoor activities to help young people (and adults too), particularly those most vulnerable in society. They took a break from their normal activities to provide us with a team building day at Windmill Farm in Clanfield, Oxfordshire, the site of a future AdventureBase (more on this towards the end).

After tucking into some lunch, we split into two groups that would be in competition for the rest of the day: the Conkers and Driiink. The first activity saw us challenge our verbal communication skills with a building challenge – using Lego Duplo. Each group split into two architects, two builders, and two messengers.

The architects had to communicate the shape of a pre-built Lego building to the messengers using only the power of speech. The messengers task was to then communicate this information to the builders, whose job it was to build a replica in another room. If there’s one thing we learned from this activity it’s that verbal communication is vital to getting a job done well. Oh, and that we shouldn’t ever try building a house.

Next up was an activity loved by everyone: archery. Specifically, training for a contest later in the day, where we would have to pit our skills with a bow and arrow against each other in a timed race. And if the prospect of a time-sensitive archery contest with eager amateurs sounds deliciously dangerous, you should carry on reading to the end.

But of course, there had to be another quick challenge before we got our hands on a deadly weapon: “spin the magic carpet”. That’s probably not its official title but it sums it up pretty well. Each group had to stand on a rug (with 6 in each group) which was a pretend magic carpet, floating many metres in the air. In order to set the carpet back down on the ground again, we had to read the instructuctions, rather inconveniently located on the underside of the carpet.

Unfortunately, as the carpet was suspending us in mid-air, none of us could get off the rug to spin it around. This led to some ingenious solutions to a problem that ended with us getting closer than we usually get in the office. If this was what was meant by “team building” this was going to be a revealing day in more ways than one.

Before the day’s finale, there would be one more activity. Scattered around a garden was a series of objects, ranging from a tyre to a tennis racket. We were taken on a walk around the garden and were told to remember as many aspects of the walk as possible. This is because we were then asked to walk around the garden, only this time blindfolded; the objective was to collect as many of the objects as possible while still managing to get back to where we started.

To aid us all around the garden, all we had was a rope to hold on to, and one sneaky idea: we were only told we had to put on our blindfolds when we left the starting point, leading to both groups leaving one person at the beginning, unblindfolded, to direct the others around the garden. Remarkably, a few minutes and close encounters with some hedges later, both teams managed to pick up most of the objects and return to somewhere in the vicinity of the starting point.

All of day’s previous activities were just leading up to one epic finale: a time-sensitive archery contest. But of course there would be a twist. While one team was pelting targets with arrows, trying to rack up as many points as possible, the other team had to maneuver a tennis ball around an obstacle course using only some pipes cut in half to act as ramps.

But before you think we could simply walk around the course carrying the ball steadily in a pipe, the restriction was that you weren’t allowed to move while holding onto the pipe and tennis ball, meaning they had to be passed along in a line to the finishing point. The finishing point didn’t make things easy either, as the ball had to rest in a holder, and if the ball fell on the floor at any point from start to the finish, the team would have to start again. All the while, the other team were free to shoot arrows until their opponents had completed their challenge.

Who ended up winning? Despite having a massive advantage on the archery contest, the Conquers lost a closely fought battle which saw team Driiink do much better on the rest of the other activities that day. But, as the Conquers will be quick to tell you, it isn’t the winning that was important, but that we spent the day doing something as a team.

Plus, we got to see the hopeful future location of Adventure Plus’s AdventureBase, 50 acres of stunning rural space that Adventure Plus are starting to raise money for. The challenge for the first year is to raise £500,000, with the total goal being £1.4 million, and as part of PROJECT:PLEDGE, we will be continuing to help Adventure Plus on their journey, and you will see more details on this shortly over on the PROJECT:PLEDGE website.