Met League 4, 2024: Seniors
A crisp but bright day greeted our athletes that headed to Stanborough Park for the fourth Met League fixture of the season. The ladies were small in number for a variety of different reasons but with squad numbers slowly increasing, there is plenty of optimism for the rest of this season and beyond.
First home was once again Alicia McArdell, finishing in 32th. This beats her 39th at Uxbridge and sees her position continue to improve with each fixture. A lack of warm-up meant that Claire Allen’s 2nd Met League performance was slightly down on her first (67th at Wormwood) but 75th is still a position to be proud of! Next home was Kate Stockings, suffering with a bad cold but determined to turn out for the team. Unsure how she’d run, she started steady and finished in 109th- down on her usual but pleasing given the circumstances. Katie Olert was similarly feeling poorly but ran her best to finish in 131rd. As both Katie and Claire begin training in earnest for spring marathons, we wish them luck and look forward to seeing them race at forthcoming fixtures!Following a depleted senior men’s team at the last fixture, it was disappointing for it to be a further scorer down at this one. However there were some strong performances including Oliver Bushdari leading the team home in 17th. His recent ‘training camp’ is clearly paying off as he claimed his best Met ever position, although it should’ve been even higher had he not miscounted the number of completed laps. Tom Beedell was rapidly closing on Oliver in the closing stages as his mid-race struggles had meant he had some left in the tank for a hard finish. Tom took 18th and was impressed to see U20 Nathan Wright running with him at some points, clearly pushing himself amongst the field of seniors. Nathan is in great shape as we reach the championship-heavy period of XC season and placed 33rd today.
Another excellent performance saw Dan Steel’s recent revival continues with him coming in just 10 seconds after Nathan in 37th, his highest Met position for over 4 years. This certainly bodes well for his marathon next month. Mike Waddington (78th) had battled illness all week but fortunately for the team he felt well enough to race, albeit 200m in he knew it would be more of a tempo effort. Harold Wyber (94th) pleasingly executed his race plan to claim a top 100 finish and narrowly out sprinting two Ealing rivals.
Simon Beedell (126th) has been managing an injury niggle but will have been hindered by his curtailed warm up of a single minute following a late arrival. Bertie Powell (187th) notched up his 96th consecutive finish and his impending century performance is enough motivation for his dad Trevor to lace up his XC shoes one more time. Paul Stockings (340th) is starting to close in on a double century of finishes but today’s amended course meant he had a few WGEL vests lap him. The hope will be that there are a few more of these vests ahead of him at the final fixture next month, which should mean the team holds onto 4th place overall, though Harrow are in close contention.