Met League 1, Claybury: Young Athletes

In the winter’s first cross country fixture at an autumnal Claybury Park, Woodford’s youngsters were present in reasonable numbers, producing an excellent team performance and some notable individual results. Apart from taking an early lead in the newly instituted Howard William’s trophy for the best combined score for Junior teams, the highlights were a one-two finish by Canaan Solomon and Daniel Rowden in the U13B’s race and a third place by Lauren McGregor in the U17W event. This first fixture also provided both a sharp reminder to track tuned legs used to flat surfaces and some good experience to some of our youngsters experiencing the Met League for the first time (eight U13s).

Results from the league website

Photos by Ken Bray

Photos courtesy of Dave Barrett

In the U13 Boys race, Canaan Solomon and Daniel Rowden made the early pace along with a St Mary’s runner and by the end of the first lap had built a 30m lead over the chasers. Canaan made his break half way round the second lap and came home 15 seconds ahead of Daniel who tracked and then overtook the St Mary’s runner and ended up 20 seconds clear. Three 11 year olds also made their Met League debuts, James Wakefield (20^th), Harry Cavell (25^th) and Christopher Hogg (28^th) gamely completing the course.

For the U13 girls, Alicia McArdell in 4^th was our first runner home (10 seconds down on the Herts Phoenix winner) and she was closely followed home by Sky Mulvey 11 second back in 5^th place; both looked comfortable mixing it at the front of the race with other leaders. Debutants Jodie Ratcliff and Rosie Poole completed the ‘A’ team scoring in 8^th and 9^th place respectively to give the team a commanding lead in the league table. Katherine Myers (15^th) and Abbie Dell (19^th) also finished well but Abbie, perhaps suffering the effects of Tuesday’s Chingford League race and an immunisation on Friday, looked somewhat shell-shocked at the finish, however the pair of them will have benefited hugely from the experience.

For the U17W, we had expected Lauren McGregor to run well and she did not disappoint with a 3^rd place finish only 4 seconds adrift of Hert’s Lizzie Bird in first; not far behind was a determined looking Amelia Barrett (a first winter U15G) in a highly creditable 7^th place, 50 seconds down on Lauren. Isobel Moss (15^th) and Ellie Foster (21^st) made up the scoring four whilst Holly Bedeau (22^nd), Lucy Hayes (24^th), Lauren Freeman (30^th) and Stephanie Smith (41^st) made up the ‘B’team.

Our U17 Men also led the way in the team competition with James Stockings in a fine 4^th place (18 seconds down on the winner) beating Beagle’s Tommy Bower by 7 seconds; Perry Rowan (15^th), Ryan Dunne (17^th) and Sean Kenny (20^th) packed well for the team score. Elliot Joseph (36^th) and sprinter, turned middle distance runner Ferdie Lyons in 54^th rounded off our presence.

In the team competition, both of our U13 teams and the U17M team finished first and the U17W team finished third to give us our lead in the Howard Williams’ trophy; this is a particularly pleasing result after our patchy history in putting out scoring teams in recent seasons. The challenge will be to keep putting similar numbers of our runners on the start line in the remaining four fixtures.