ERRA Women's 6-Stage Road Relay, Sutton Park
Reserves land sunny side up
Will Cockerell reports:- With eight of our top nine runners unavailable for this one, it was time to put the depth of our squad under the microscope. As is the TM’s mantra, no depth means no squad, so this was an important day.
Up first was Lenka (pictured right), who was startled by the sheer numbers at the venue. “They have nothing like this back home!” she said wide-eyed. The ferocious, narrow, descending start and then the tough climb is always going to be a shock to a debutante’s system, just as it was with Zoë 18 months ago, but Lenka grimly hung on to hand over in a steady 16th.
Amy has had some injury problems and will let the marathon go for now. After getting a late nod from her physio we were relieved to be able to call on her, but not having run a step for 6 weeks, this was always going to be painful. However, she fought hard to keep us in the top 30.
Lou was probably our man-of-the-match for her strong shimmy on 3 and as we await her marathon result with great interest, she set up the twins on 4&5 (so called because it’s impossible to tell their running abilities apart.) Vicki was deemed to be fractionally fitter for this one, and before late withdrawals, she was in the team over Tilly. Wrong! It was Tilly who went quicker by seven ticks.
75 minutes before her leg, Rieko radioed in from the M40 to say her GPS was telling her 80 minutes, and that she was stuck behind a car fire. Bad news, and it looked like we were in for a huge anti-climax. With some Schumacher driving though, Rieko arrived with 5 minutes to go and smoothly anchored us home.
Our comparison with last year’s four relays makes good reading. We have turned figures of: no team, 49th, 11th, no team; into 30th, 42nd, 4th, 24th. Add to that the bronze at the SEAA cross-country relay and this is certainly a team heading in the right direction. All eyes on 2011-12, and let’s come to the party at cross-country too.
1 Aldershot Farnham and District 1:41:21; 2 Charnwood AC 1:45:46; 3 Swansea H 1:47:25; ... 24 Belgrave H 1:58:21. 66 teams started, 47 finished.
L Vseteckova (16) 17:30; A Linford (29) 20:04; L Blizzard (27) 18:55; V Goodwin (25) 19:45; M Heaton (22) 19:38; R Trees (24) 22:29.
Fastest: C Purdue (AFD) 15:23; 2 L Howarth (Leigh) 15:41; 3 H Whitmore (Charnwood) 16:01.
Restored from the club's earlier website, belgraveharriers.com, and published here as originally written.