“How the hell did you come up with a name like that?”, you might ask. Once again, I might answer “None of your damn business!” But I won’t this time. I’ll fill you in as best I can in a paragraph or two. Our team is sponsored in part by IOGT (International Organization of Good Templars). And if you’re wondering, there’s no relation to the Knights Templar, who decided that the Crusades were a little too boring, so they went on a murderous rampage across Europe en route to the Holy Land: Starbucks. Come to think of it, Brent and I might be rampaging through the woods… a lot… but no plans for murder. We’re bringing energy bars, so killing and eating anything shouldn’t be necessary. Which is good, because it could cost us a big chunk of time to cook it properly.
Okay, so you know IOGT wasn’t really into the Crusades, but what is it? Basically, someone decided over 150 years ago that he was tired of seeing so many poor, destitute people on the streets, their lives ruined ’cause they kept gettin’ liquored up. So he went on a murderous rampage. But he created IOGT as an anti-alcohol group, gathering people who didn’t drink and trying to help people who did. It’s kind of a cool history… you can read about it here. The tradition has continued up through now, though in our area, we’re trying to expand that focus to a generally healthy lifestyle. No alcohol, no drugs, constant adventure racing—aaaaah, that’s the life of a member of IOGT. Or not.
And I’m not going to let you ask about the Frost part—I’m gonna make it part of your damn business if you’re still reading this part. I’m not sure how it occurred to Brent, really. We’d talked about names relating to adventurers or scavengers, but one day he called me on the phone to ask about a poem. He had a vague idea about the title, so given my English major in college, I only needed to rummage through two books before finding what he was looking for: The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost. And he thought about that poem because of the last few lines:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I–
I took the one less traveled by.
And that has made all the difference.
Sounds kinda cool, doesn’t it? Well, I think it does and this is my blog, dammit! So there! (Admittedly, I’m sometimes concerned about how well it applies considering how often we go running straight through the woods and ignore the roads completely…) But the point is that we took that last part of the poem as kind of a slogan and honored its author by stealing his name and using it for our own benefit, thus creating the team name “GT Frost.”
Hmmm… I guess that took more than one or two paragraphs. Maybe I should get back to the original story…
