Three Serpie teams competed today at the ERRA National Road Relay Championships in Sutton Park: one men’s team (having qualified three weeks ago at the regional relays in Aldershot) and two women’s teams. It the first time we’d sent three teams and it proved to be a very successful day.

The women raced first and Mariah, running stage 1, immediately broke the club record for this course. Natalie and Jane, running stages 2 and 3, also came very close to the same time in what was proving to be a very closely matched team, and by the end of stage 3 we were already 9 places higher than we’d ever achieved previously. Finally Becky Glover raced stage 4 and continuing her fine form from the Met. League XC last weekend knocked another 15 seconds off Mariah’s new course record and moved the team up to 20th place – 10 places higher than our previous best – and a new national 4 stage club record of 1:03:06

Meanwhile, our B team was also steadily moving up the field with some more solid perfomances finishing an excellent 51st from 73 teams in 1:10:23

Mariah McConnaughey 00:15:46
Natalie Kolodziej 00:15:52
Jane Fanning 00:15:57
Rebecca Glover 00:15:31

Maggie Purr 00:17:29
Marielle Vestlund 00:17:37
Jennifer Bradley 00:18:05
Claire Imrie 00:17:12

Aldershot Farnham & District ‘A’ won the women’s championship in 0:57:09

Five minutes later, the men’s race started. With Nick Torry unable to race, we’d called up new member Aodh O’Neill and were wondering just how well we would do with a very high standard of competiton evident (Mo Farah was racing, amongst others). Richard Phillips got the team off to a good start by getting within 1 second of Nick’s current club record for the course. Hugh, Hendrik, Simon and Aodh all put in great performances and by the end of stage 5 we’d moved up to 45th place – but still 3 places behind our best time (from 2008). Finally Eric had a great 6th leg moving up 4 places to put us 41st, another best-ever placing for this chamionship, and at 1:55:05 it was 1m42 faster than previously.

Richard Phillips 00:18:29
Hugh Torry 00:18:53
Hendrik Zietsman 00:19:18
Simon Barrett 00:19:34
Aodh O’Neill 00:19:43
Eric Vamben 00:19:08

Newham And Essex Beagles ‘A’ won the men’s championship in 1:43:14

Congratulations to all three teams!

Full results are available on http://www.race-results.co.uk/results/2009/index.htm. A history of all the Serpie performances is available in http://www.serpentine.org.uk/data/files/pages/results/Serpentine_road_relay_results.xls.

Further info.