We kicked off this season’s Sunday League with a visit to the Lucy Warren Open Space in Broxbourne. A not particularly challenging course but some weird elements like a tough camber section and a narrow path with runners going in both directions. In spite of missing a few of our top runners among both the men and women we had a good turnout and were confident of doing pretty well.

When the men started to come through the finish it didn’t look great. There were plenty of Royston Runners and St Albans Striders up the front and our first finisher was Charlie Bruce in 7th place, a strong run. Charlie was closely followed by Andy Naylor, Matt Petch Cooper, Dave Weir, Jim Arrowsmith, Ben Allen, Matt Littleford and Scott Aiken to make up our scoring team. This strength in depth meant that in spite of missing out on the top spots we still came out on top. This scoring team were also backed up by our next group including Dan Greenwood, Francis Mannion, Simon Nash, Will Rowley and Paul Brennan who pushed the competition’s lower scorers down the list. A fantastic win for the team. When it comes to the Vets competition we were always going to score well with so many Vets among our top scorers and so it proved with a resounding victory.

The women also looked like a good team but were missing a few potential top scorers. They ran very strongly against tough competition and ended up a very close 2nd behind St Albans Striders. Our scorers were Kat Kruse, Mahdiyyah Banoo, Aimee Jenner, Siobhan Weir and Sorrel Evangelou. Sorrel was particularly worth picking out as this was her first race for the Club and I think was her first ever cross country. In the Vets competition we were exellent with Kat, Aimee and Siobhan winning from St Albans.

All in all this was a brilliant start to the season and with our own home race next up on 1st November we can put ourselves in a very strong position for the season. It was very nice to see a few new faces out there including, like Sorrel, Dan Greenwood was having his first experience of a cross country. I hope the enthusiasm continues when the ground gets a bit soggy or frosty solid.

Photos taken are up on the Club’s Photo Gallery and I’ve also seen some on flickr at https://www.flickr.com/photos/bunnyhuggingvolunteer/albums/72177720335849598/

Special thanks go to Chris Prescott for recording the lady finishers while I made a bit of a palaver of recording the men finishers only baled out by Scott giving me a hand.

Let’s see if we can go for a clean sweep at Trent Park in 3 weeks. We need a big turnout and smash it to the competition.