We entered 3 teams in this relays event that many of us were unaware of until late in the day. It has been running for many years and attracts many teams from clubs that we are used to racing against in the various leagues we race in. It is a brilliant event, well organised, if a little chaotic in the handover area, but fantastic fun. This is something we should keep in the plans for next year and enter lots of teams from across the Club.

Considering we didn’t have much time to pull together our teams we ended up with 3 very strong teams all in different categories. We had a team in the Men’s Vet competition who were always going to be up against it as far as winning medals were concerned with John Rose (V60), Paul Ward (V60), Ed Rios (V50) and Richard Allen (V40) up against teams full of runners at the younger end of the vet age span. They finished 12th among the male vets teams with Ed Rios having an outstanding leg of 10.24.

Our other 2 teams both had great performances and made it into the top 3 in the categories they raced in. We entered a strong team in the mixed category with Andy Naylor, Ben Allen, Kat Alpe and Mahdiyyah Banoo. It was very difficult to tell how they were doing as picking out other mixed teams was impossible. They ended up in 2nd place which was an outstanding performance. The whole team ran great times, and probably the best was Kat whose time of 11.22 was the 7th best of all the women over the evening and 2nd FV40.

Our 3rd team was our Senior Men’s team which was made up of a mix of Juniors and Seniors. The team consisted of Robin Greenwood, Adam Bowman, Joe Feather and Dylan Hanks. It was much easier to follow progress with this team as they were in 2nd place for the whole race following a very strong Herts Phoenix team. As you might expect with such a result we had some very strong individual performances with Joe 3rd fastest on the night in 9.18 and Robin 4th in 9.20, Adam wasn’t far behind these and Dylan was also right up there. When you see the strength of some of the other teams this was an asolutely outstanding result. It is worth remembering that Robin is still only 15 and Dylan is 17. Joe Heather is a new recruit to the Club having won Triffic Trail this year and should be a brilliant new recruit.

This was a great celebration of running with 145 teams of the full range of abilites all enjoying a real fun event. It would be wonderful if we could enter plenty of teams from all parts of the Club next year and make it a regular feature of the Club calendar. Photographs I took are on the Club’s Photo Gallery and there are some super photos taken by Keith Fenwick which can be accessed via Facebook.

Chas