Southern RRs: M50s medal; seniors qualify
On the opening day of the new winter season at Aldershot, it was our M50 team of Chase, Cumming, Cox and Pamphilon that took the honours as they came from behind to win bronze medals in their 4-stage event. Our senior men's 6-stage team comfortably qualified for the National on 16th October, with Shone and Powell particularly impressing.
None of our four M50s were in peak condition for this event but they all have a fine pedigree and believed they could be in the mix nonetheless. Paul Chase got things going by running 23.25 for the 6K leg, handing over in 12th place of the 19 participants. Iain Cumming had been on the 2009 team which lifted silver medals, and his 23.18 for leg 2 was only 13" slower than then. It brought us on by two places.
Dave Cox had run 20.59 last year. Not in quite the same form, his 21.23 was nonetheless 4th fastest of the day and put us into 7th, with Aldershot around 30" ahead in the bronze medal position (and silver and gold out of sight). And Tony Pamphilon, with a long history of excellent anchor legs, coldly and calmly did the necessary with a 21.34 clocking which was 6th fastest of the day (fastest was 20.50). He passed Hillingdon, Dulwich, Harrow and finally Aldershot, who he gapped by a tidy 11".
The senior men have never developed a culture of loving this event. It comes just after the track runners' traditional end-of-season break and coaches are often loathe to release their men from autumn's mileage-accumulation duties. Nonetheless we usually manage to qualify for the national event in mid-October, by which point more men are ready to race.
Discovered relatively recently to be a particularly good leg 1 runner, Matt Shone impressed yet again. He had hoped to make the top 10, but the standard was very good this year and he was 13th, yet in a time which was far better than he had anticipated - 18.42, his second-fastest on this course in many years of running it. On leg 2 though, we dropped back to 21st as Craig Berg seemed to pay the price for a recent illness, his 20.00 being almost a minute down on his 2009 run.
It had been 18 months and several injuries since Daniel Hawellek's last race, and he had only run 8 times in 8 weeks, but he delivered a very useful 19.21 on leg 3, passing 6 men in the process. On leg 4 we were back in a bit of trouble when Angus Holford, like Berg, found he really had not recovered from a recent illness. His disappointing 20.34 saw us back in 20th again and in a spot of trouble with 2 legs left. (The team was under the impression that only 20 teams would qualify for the national, though in reality the figure was 25.)
But Bertie Powell rose to the occasion and produced a very pleasing time of 18.54 which was almost a minute quicker than in 2009. It also proved what a good athlete Powell is after a period where he has suffered from a mini-crisis of confidence. It left Andy Mariani fairly safe in 16th at the handover and, though the asthmatic Mariani struggled with his breathing - probably after hanging round all afternoon in cold conditions with insufficient clothing! - his 19.57 was good enough to leave us, safely if unspectacularly, in 17th place at the death.
Ed Messer made a tentative comeback after months of illness, running 21.08 as a B team man on leg 1.
Team manager Terry McCarthy said, "I'm glad that's out of the way. There were a few positives in there, especially Powell's run and Hawellek's reappearance. But the main thing is that we are through to the nationals."