London City Runner Met League race 4: Young Athletes
For Saturday’s London City Runner Metropolitan League fixture, Trent Park was bathed in clear, cold air and winter light with long shadows stretching their fingers across grass. With some parts of the park never out of the shade, patches of ground remained solid after the hard, overnight frost and our runners had to watch their footing on the unpredictable surface.
The Poole siblings took a sizeable share of the headlines, Rosie with her fourth consecutive Met League win and 10 year old brother Alfie breaking into the single figure with his 9th place finish. Isabel Levine’s eye-catching 5th place in the U15/U17W race and a welcome return to racing for Isobel Moss were other pleasing aspects to the day’s racing. Several of our older runners opted to miss this event with the Essex Schools and Southern Championships on the horizon so it was largely left to our U13s to toe the starting line.
In the U13 Girls event, Rosie Poole made straight for the lead and within 200m already had a 5 metre advantage over the other 25 runners, the distinctive pony tail and height of Jodi Ratcliff also in evidence as she took up the chase a couple of places behind. Rosie extended her lead as the race headed out across the park to the north and by the time she returned she was 23 seconds clear of the chasing Courtney Marshall (St Mary’s) in second place. Jodi Ratcliff finished strongly in 5th but in some discomfort with a sore back whilst the pair of Aiofe Guyatt and Katy Petyt finished 6 seconds apart in 11th and 12th to close the team score and nail another win for the team thus retaining top league spot. Bolstering our squad were Sian Osborne (making her debut) and a nervous Olivia Housome racing for the second time in the green and white hoops; both gave a good account themselves finishing 19th and 15th respectively and importantly ahead of other scoring runners and helping to keep Herts Phoenix at bay.
As Canaan Solomon was rested, it was left to Alfie Poole to lead our U13 Boys home; Herts’ Jamie Philpott claimed his second successive win ahead of the 34 runners with a time of 11m03; Shaftsbury wrapped up the team result with an impressive 4 runners in the top 10. A beaming Alfie made it back in a time of 12m14 (7 seconds before the 4th Shaftsbury lad) racing up the finishing hill without seeming to bat an eyelid. Our scorers however, were lead home by James Wakefield (18th) with Harry Cavell (22nd), Taylor Reece (28th) and Chris Hogg (30th) supporting and all of whom look stronger as each race goes by.
In the U15/17 Women’s race, Isabel Levine’s 5th place finish demonstrated that she favours hilly courses and heavy surfaces where she seems to make light of the effort (and clearly having raced in a swimming gala the previous evening and trained early on Saturday morning had no adverse effect). Isobel Moss dipped a cautious toe back in the cross country racing water to finish both relieved and pleased in 25th ahead of next week’s Essex Schools whilst Stephanie Smith was two places back in 27th; both runners contributing valuable points to keep our team in third place in the league. We had no starters in the U15/U17 Men’s race.