Thames Valley 5x3.5 miles Road Relay, Stockley Park
Enter … Martin Dent ... to smash the lap record at Stockley Park
Right: Kevin Nash brought us home first on leg one.
Photo by Patricia Mead
With a strong team in action in the following day’s activities “up North”, our squad for the TVH Road Relay was depleted – but interesting. With three international runners interspersed with those “gold ol’ boys” Bruce Barton and Steve Zealey we expected the team to yo-yo up and down the field as the race progressed but Bruce and Steve exceeded expectations and we wound up second across the line and oh! so close to a first.
In fact it was an unofficial second as our last man, Martin Dent, although the holder of a British passport, has raced for Australia internationally and as a result has to undergo a short period of waiting before being eligible to compete for us.
Kevin Nash did the business on stage one to clock the third fastest time of the day and hand over to Bruce in the lead but with Shaftesbury’s international 1500m runner Tony Whiteman not far behind. Unsurprisingly Bruce ignored Whiteman and just kept his feet on the ground as a black and white striped whirlwind hit him a few hundred metres up the road. Bruce concentrated on running at his own pace and the end of his stint saw him hand over to David Anderson in fifth. David soon ate up the two men ahead but the leading pair were out of sight and although he ran the second fastest time of the day and gained considerable ground, it was more or less a solo effort.
We’ve previously reported that Steve Zealey filled out our National Cross team admirably and here he gamely took over in third – and held it! His tremendous effort meant that Martin Dent, 1 minute and 12 seconds down on the leader, had just a remote chance of pulling us back to the front. Aldershot were now leading from Shaftesbury.
And didn’t Martin go for it! He reeled in the Shaftesbury man and then set about the remaining team ahead. With half a mile to go the gap was down to about 20 seconds and shrinking all the time – but the finish came up just in time to save the Aldershot man from being pipped on the line. What we had witnessed was the most amazing run seen on this circuit for Martin’s time was six seconds inside the previous lap record set by Aldershot’s young star Chris Thompson. Sadly, this fact was totally ignored at the presentation simply because our man has another eight days to go before he is cleared to compete for us. Nevertheless, we have ascertained that the time WILL go down as the lap record and in the meantime we eagerly anticipate seeing what Martin can do at Milton Keynes.
Maria Sharp was our only runner in the women's race but she had a terrific run to chase home the leader on the first stage for a 20:26 clocking.
1 Aldershot F&D 1:29:24; n/s Belgrave 1:29:42; 2 Shaftesbury Barnet H 1:30:29; 3 Windsor SE&H 1:31:31.
K.Nash (1) 17:11; B.Barton (5) 19:35; David Anderson (3) 17:04; S.Zealey (3) 19:13; M.Dent (2) 16:41.
Fastest: M.Dent (Belgrave) 16:41 (lap record); David Anderson (Belgrave) 17:02; K.Nash (Belgrave) 17:11.
Restored from the club's earlier website, belgraveharriers.com, and published here as originally written.