Women’s Team

Wednesday evening saw a much better result for the second Midweek league race at St.Albans. Despite some issues with heavy motorway traffic we mustered together a strong team for this mostly flat race.

Kat Alpe stormed in as our first scorer in fifth place with an incredible new PB time of 37.52. She was soon followed by Jen and Alex Baird finishing in 7th and 9th places respectively and both under 39 minutes. Fourth lady home was Emily Clarke in 15th place followed by Anja Greenwood in 16th place. This meant our vet’s team were all in the top 16 making us clear winners in this category!

Poppy Allright had an incredible run with a 5k PB in the first half of the race(!) and finishing first U20 in 43.14. Our final two scorers were Zoe Redondo and Emily Jeanes in 37th and 38th places. So our overall team position for the race was second, a massive improvement on 5th in the first race.

We were backed up by a wonderfully full team (30 women in total!) of Sue Thomas, Sarah de los Rios, Melissa O’Hare, Sue Cross, Celine Ledbury, Kim Adams (PB), Chris Hawker, Deana Lawla, Julie Mimnagh, Zara Dickson, Ann Marie John, Fran Bolton, Jo Allen, Tali Swart, Michelle Watters, Kathy Allman, Geraldine Turner, Tracy Pearson, Ann Ward, Natasha de Souza, Alison White and Andrea Berkoff.

So it is all to play for in this week’s race on Thursday at home in Trent Park. Please try to make it if you can, every single person matters.

Men’s Team

We met in Highfield Park in St Albans for the second race in this year’s Midweek League series. We were without our first two finishers in race 1 and further impacted by a good number of our runners being caught up in an incident on the M25 and not making the start.

In spite of that we had a slightly better showing. The A team finished 4th with the scoring team of Charlie Bruce, Max Kercher, Jim Arrowsmith, Ben Halstead, Scott Aiken, Carl Redondo, Ethan Jackson, Ed Rios, David Weir, Dave Kunzmann, Mark Holloway and Ben Allen. Our vets team also finished 4th and consisted of Charlie, Jim, Scott, Carl, Ed and David. We had a total of 41 men finishing even without the missing M25ers and they all did superbly. Big turnout at Trent Park incoming.

Special mention must go to Ben Allen who ran and scored just 3 days after his brilliant sub 3 hour Edinburgh Marathon. Also the three amigos under 20s had amazing runs with Max (2nd for TP), Ben (4th) and Ethan (7th). I think if we can get all of our missing scorers back for the Trent Park race we can make up ground. Congratulations to the women who had an amazing turnround from race 1.

Can I thank Chris Prescott, Viona Dimmock, Vici Allwright, Alex Brown and Paul Hart for a great job scoring. Last but not least Angelica Lavon for taking the camera and smashing the record for photos taken.

This week we are at Trent Park for our own Midweek League race and I hope we can have a massive turnout, some great results and lots of fun.

Anja Greenwood and Chas Taylor