Chingford League Hogs Hill 5K: Nov 3rd
With a full moon illuminating the track at Hog Hill on Tuesday night, the runners cast clear shadows as they competed in the season’s third Chingford League fixture. Field sizes were up from the previous Hog Hill event despite this clashing with the Redbridge Schools’ Championships at Claybury in the afternoon (although that didn’t stop some doing both).
The best performance from the Woodford contingent was in the U15G race where Georgina Ferrari, Ellie Foster, Holly Bedeau and Amy Doyle filled the first four places respectively (with Georgina and Holly both 20 seconds quicker than last time) thereby depriving Orion of a clean sweep of the young athlete races. We also scored a couple of second place finishes; from Ryan Dunne in the U15B and Claudia Conway in the U17W. Joe Smith made a welcome appearance in the U13B race and recorded a fine 5th place; he was accompanied by sprinter/field eventer Ferdie Lyons who had his introduction to distance running and finished 15th. Sean Kenny had another sound run in the U15B race coming home in 7th and reckoning that his pace judgement and endurance had improved.
Our sole representative in the U17M age group was Lorcan Murphy who is quietly beginning to reap the rewards of consistent training and improved endurance; he finished in 5th place whilst in the U13G race, Sinead Sheehy and Issy Bedeau finished 14th and 16th in the largest young athlete field of the night (20 runners).
Senior representation from Woodford was sparse in what seemed to be a significantly larger field than the last Hog Hill race. With the seniors tackling the steep hill to the finish line four times, the usual suspects of Karim Ali, Alistair Holford, Becky Hewitt and Stuart Phillips were joined by Roger Green (who seems to look younger the older he gets – or was it just the moonlight) with vocal support leant from the touchline by Charlie Crump and Ken Bray. With the results not yet available, Alistair reported a 35 second improvement over last time, whilst Becky felt she never recovered from starting at the back of the field and timekeeper Stuart forgot to stopwatch so is currently none the wiser.