Massive turnout for club mile championship
Over ninety Serpies raced in the 1 mile championships at Paddington last night. Helen Palmer, Jonathan Bradford and Andrew Reeves picked up the trophies.
On a still, hot evening a large queue soon formed at registration as your author tried to remember everyone's names and type them into the laptop fast enough to keep to the planned start time of 7.30pm. After the usual fun and games trying to seed everyone into graded groups we ended up with seven races: five men's and two women's.
In the end we got underway pretty much on time with the first men's race: the 6min+ pace, which was won in well under 6mins! As the races completed, more and more Serpies were crowded round the finish line to cheer on the other racers creating a great atmosphere.
The final women's race was once again won emphatically by Helen Palmer (5:14.8) who has now won all three of the grand-prix races so far. The men's A race proved to be quite slow for the first three laps as nobody wanted to take the lead, then Ragab decided to take it on and it looked like he was going to win until Jonathan Bradford sprinted past him in the final 80m to win in 4:36.1. Andrew Reeves won the age-graded race with a score of 85%
The races couldn't have happened without a host of helpers, some qualified officials, some not. Track judging proved to be quite challenging with many races having a lot of athletes crossing the line in close succession, so thanks to Malcolm French, Ian Hodge, Sally Hodge, Andrew Maynard, Lars Olsen, Peter McKintosh, Sarah Knox, Jen Bradley, James Edgar, Hans Ho, Ian Benge and Marie Devere.
In the 2015 grand-prix, Helen is the clear women's leader and Andrew leads the men's competition. Andrew is also the age-graded leader. Full grand-prix results.
In the 2015 club championship, after 5 races Daniel de Palol is in the lead, closely followed by Richard Taylor and David P Evans. Club championship results.
Submitted: 1 July 2015