Women’s Team

Wednesday saw the last of our club 10k races of the summer with the Mob Match Midweek League race at Welwyn. Another flat’ish course on the cycle paths and pavements around the local industrial estates and including a fair number of underpasses.

Our first lady home in 4th position and with a brilliant time of 38 mins and 38 seconds was Kat Alpe who was also presented with a nice trophy afterwards as the overall winner of the V35 category for the whole league. Second Trent Park lady to cross the finish line was Jen Baird in 9th position and in comfortably sub-40 minutes. Anja Greenwood was third lady home in 15th position followed by Poppy Allwright in 46th place. Anja picked up the runners-up trophy in the V45 category at the award ceremony following the race and Poppy was the much-deserved overall winner of the U20 category for the season.

Next was Claire Goldfinch (60th) and Foulla Green (71st) with an impressive time of just over 50 minutes making her third in her age category. Our runners then came in thick and fast with Celine Ledbury (105th), Lauretta Gavin (107th), Rosemary Bains (111th) and Karen Miller (114th). Rosemary finished in 55 minutes making her 4th in her age category.

Our women’s team finished the Midweek league third overall and our vet’s team picked up medals as we were overall winners for the league in division one. Not bad for what has been a difficult year for the women’s team with many illnesses and absences.

It was also the final race with myself and Emily Clarke as joint women’s team captains. We have really enjoyed captaining this wonderful team for more than three years but both feel it is time to step down for someone else to take over. Anna Sikorska and Bev TIpping will make great joint captains when they start in September for the beginning of the XC season. Please give them your full support.

Men’s Team

The Mob Match is the traditional way in which the curtain is drawn on the Midweek League season and gives all 21 teams in the 3 divisions the opportunity to race against each other. This race does not contribute to league or individual trophies which may contribute to the fact that quite a few runners from all clubs take the opportunity to give it a miss.

We did have 25 men running for the Club which wasn’t too bad and compares fairly well against other clubs. The guys finished 4th and contributed, along with the women, to the club finishing 3rd. The scoring team consisted of Matt Hogsden, Scott Aiken, Ben Allen, Jim Arrowsmith, Dave Kunzmann, Paul Brennan, Dan Marriott, Stephen Moss, John Rose, Paul Ward, Nick Butcher and Richard Allen. It was nice to see some new names amongst our scorers.

When it comes to the vet team things were similar to the A team where we finished 4th for the men’s team and also 4th jointly with the women. The scorers for the vets were Scott, Jim, Dave, Paul, Dan and Stephen. We were one of only 3 clubs who had enough runners to make a second full team which is great. Everyone did a super job as they have done all season but we do need to strengthen for next year or we will find it very hard to be in contention for the big prizes.

Thanks again go to our scorers of Chris, Vici and Miranda who did their usual very efficient job. Hopefully see many of you at the Track Mile on Wednesday.

Full results available on http://www.runherts.com/

Anja Greenwood and Chas Taylor