The first race of this year’s cross country season took place at Hoddesdon in the Sunday League. It was an earlier start to the season for various reasons but that didn’t put us off and we stormed to a fantastic set of results. The men particularly did the business winning the A Team and Vet competitions and having the overall winner to boot. The women weren’t far behind even allowing for the fact that a number of our regular high placers being missing. They were 3rd in the A team and winners of the Vet competition. With all this we were overall winners on the day, an outstanding performance.

The 8 scorers for the men were Charlie Bruce, with a fantastic overall win, Luke Barker, Andy Naylor, Paul Brennan, Dave Weir, Ben Allen, Scott Aiken and Jim Arrowsmith. It is hardly surprising that we got the win with 6 of this team in the first 13 places, For the Vets our scorers were Charlie, Andy, Paul & Dave, an awesome group of older runners. In all we had 26 male runners who all did a brilliant job and I believe they all made contributions.

There were 15 women taking part and they all ran strongly and perhaps exceeded our expectations. The scorers for the A Team were Kat Alpe, Aimee Jenner, Mahdiyyah Banoo, Anna Sikorska and Claire Goldfinch. Finishing 3rd was outstanding. The ladies Vet Team was Kat, Aimee and Anna clearly winning a great competition.

As well as the great set of results there were so many things to be pleased with and worthy of recognition across the whole field. It would take too long to recognise all of these but here are just a few. We had the first Junior join the men with Theo who ran superbly, two of our mature ladies starting the challenge for V70 Club Championship, a new recruit scoring highly for the ladies with Mahdiyyah. There were other first timers or returners after a significant break and some regulars getting back to running strongly for the Club. I think things look very promising for a great season.

Not only did we have a strong turnout of runners and top results we also had a great team of volunteers who did a super job. Our volunteers were Clio Heslop, John Rose, Andrea Brennan, Lia Prado and Martin Lippitt. The fact that we had 5 meant John could concentrate on taking photos and did an outstanding job. His photos can be seen on the Club Photo Gallery at https://trentparkrc.com/gallery/.

Chas