National 6- and 4-Stage Road Relays
Our teams produced two very sound performances at the National 6- and 4-Stage Road Relays in Sutton Coldfield today. Our men finished 20th and our women 21st in this very high quality event. With neither team suffering from an obvious weak link, Matt Barnes-Smith and Linzi Snow delivered our fastest runs of the day.
The main characteristic of the National 6/4 Stage is that it is of such quality that a single weak link will upset the apple-cart and result in a loss of several - or many - places. Our teams looked solid on paper with the team managers predicting around 20th in both cases while hoping for a best case of perhaps 17th and keeping their fingers crossed against a worst case.
The first leg always involves an unusually physical start as the UK's quickest attempt to forge a position in the bunch that suits them. No prisoners are taken! The much-improved Kat Gundersen (8th in last weekend's Met League) took on the slightly intimidating task and, having survived intact, produced a good run of 16.11 for the 4.315K course (2.68 miles @ 6.02 per mile). While useful at local level, this left her 49th of the 88 starters, much as we had expected.
Diana Kennedy, not handicapped by lack of sleep as she was in last weekend's race, ran much of the leg 2 with GB 800m international Vicki Griffiths of Liverpool and chipped in a very useful 15.57, 1 second faster than Griffiths, which enabled us to progress to 32nd. (Olympian Steph Twell ran this stage in 14.00 for her club Aldershot.)
Dependable vet Linda Jackson continued our charge, overtaking 7 more teams in running 15.44. And Linzi Snow, back studying in the UK after her year on an athletic scholarship in the USA, and in the early stages of regaining fitness after injury and illness, ran our quickest stage of the day, 15.32, to leave us one short of the top 20.
Our 21st may be compared with Shaftesbury (11), Serpentine (20) and Essex clubs Havering (16) and Colchester Harriers (24), while our league rivals Highgate did not appear and Aldershot broke their own course record to win the race with their Charlotte Purdue running the fastest overall leg of 13.53. Team manager Alex Wardle commented, "The girls ran with passion, pride and no little quality. It's our 2nd best performance in this event after 2007's 14th and I'm sure we can push on from here."
In the men's race, Dan Agustus took the physical leg 1 not for the first time, having led off twice for his previous club, Sale. The men's 5.848K course lures the naive to overcook things either on the initial hill or heading across the ridge to the turnaround point at which point hearts sometimes sink and legs grow heavy on the toil back uphill to the Jamboree Stone. But Agustus is familiar with all this and produced a good run of 18.08 (3.63 miles @ 4.59 per mile) to come home in 32nd place of the 87 starters, a mere stride behind Shaftesbury's Jack Parslow, who beat him by 20 seconds last week at Ruislip.
On stage 2, Craig Berg was looking for a sub18.30 clocking but had to settle for 18.37, still 24 seconds quicker than 2008. At this early point in the race, with the quality not yet thinning out, we dropped to 37th but were confident that we would stay strong while others weakened. Alex Cornwell made his National 6-Stage debut and felt he had been tempted into the "overcooking" trap, though his 18.40 was clearly a better performance than his Southern 6-Stage leg of 3 weeks previous. At the half-way point we were still 36th.
Old 6-stage hand Matt Shone reported for duty with a cold coming on and feared the worst. Consequently he rejected any ideas of fully opening the throttle and settled for an uncharacteristic steady run topped off with a ferocious drive up the finishing hill and was astonished to record 18.16. In the process he handed over to Hywel Care in 30th place but "only" 90 seconds down on 20th.
Care's early season has not gone as well as he had hoped for but his aims are all post-Christmas and he is sticking to the formula which has seen excellent results when it counts. He ran 18.44 on leg 5 which was good enough to pass Lincoln's man and narrow the gap between us and 20th place to just 45 seconds - a good target for a nippy anchor man.
So his team manager sent Matt Barnes-Smith off with the message "It all rests on you!" ringing in his ears, and he revelled in the pressure, eating up the ground, passing runner after runner, and finishing strongly to clock 17.51, faster than Parslow and Fleming (Shaftesbury), and Sam Farah and Sterling (Newham), all of whom had beaten him at Ruislip last week.
Club members might like to compare our 20th with Highgate (27), Shaftesbury (32), Serpentine (41) and the non-appearance of any other Essex club (qualification from the Southern championship was a requirement). Thames Valley Harriers, who pipped us at Aldershot in the Southern when we were 7th, saw their two best men revert to their first claim Scottish club Central AC (11th) and also did not appear, so we were 6th Southern club (with the South providing the top four clubs in the race!).
On the other hand we were beaten by Aldershot's B team and were over 2 minutes off 15th place, so we shall continue to fix our sights upwards.
The race was won by Newham in a big new record time (Mo Farah set the day's best time of 16.33), and the overall standard was higher than in recent years, with Bedford's time in 4th place good enough to have won the race in 5 of the previous 8 years. Usually only about 8 teams break 1:48:00 but this year Blackheath's 1:47.51 was only good enough for 14th. Our own time of 1:50.15 was our fastest on the course, including faster than the 1:50:53 which won us 13th in 2006.
Poring over the statistics, team manager Terry McCarthy pointed out, "With the standard in last April's National 12-Stage also being the best this millenium, there are real indicators that club standards at the top level are rising again after several years in the doldrums. And if there is a "new wave" rolling in, Woodford Green intend to be surfing it!"
Elsewhere, Dave Cox went 3rd on the UK M55 10 mile rankings with his 57.29 at the Cabbage Patch 10. On an age-graded basis, his performance was actually better than that of winner Moumin Geele's 50.03 - 90.58% versus 89.24%!