On Sunday 29th March our teams travelled to Milton Keynes to take part in the SEAA Road Relays Championship. For the first time, we had 60 runners taking part for Serpentine: 4 teams of 6 women and 3 teams of 12 men. The weather wasn’t on our side, with windy gusts (that snatched our tent structure leaving us “outdoors” for most of the afternoon) and intermittent showers throughout the day: this made the competition tougher and times slower then previous years, but we still had some fantastic performances and great results overall

To be the only club fielding 4 women’s teams, and 4 competitive women’s teams all with strong runners, made for an amazing achievement and support for all of the runners throughout the day.
Our A team had an amazing result, coming 5th, our 2nd highest placing ever in the Southern 6-stage; our B team won the prize for 1st B team, placing 18th after battling with Belgrave B. Our C team was the 1st C team, beating a lot of B teams to place 27th; and our D team was the only D team in the competition placing 33rd.

Sarah Pemberton had the fastest run of the day with 18:41; Jen Bradley had the best performance in the B team running 20:01; marathon training is clearly paying off for Sharon Koelewyn, who ran a storming leg for the C team clocking 20:40; and Karen Gregory ran 21:30, the fastest in the D team.

For the men, our B team qualified to the Nationals, coming in 24th position (second B team overall), shortly followed by the C team in 34th and the A team in 39th.

Best performances of the day in the A team were from John Franklin (long leg in 24:58) and Hussein Ahmed (short leg in 16:39). Well done to Vanrish McLean (at his debut) and Hendrik Zietsman (coming back to race for us after a long time) who were the fastest in the B team (16:46 and 26:18 for short and long legs respectively). In the C team, the fastest runs were both from Spain with Pau Herrero (long leg) and Javi Gomez (short leg) clocking the fastest runs for the C team.

Special thanks from me to James Gwyther, whose car broke down on the way up to Milton Keynes, but who went back home, drove his fiance’s car to the venue and still manage to run leg 12, allowing us to have three full teams!

Full results available at http://mcs.open.ac.uk/mkac/15seaamteam.htm

Thanks to all who took part and supported: it was a great mix of regulars and newbies, hopefully to be repeated in future events. The first one on the list is the National road relays, which will be held on Saturday 11th April in Sutton Coldfield, where three Serpie women’s teams and one men’s team will compete. Wish us luck!

Jo & Nick