Over 30 Serpies made the trip to Sutton Coldfield on Saturday to contest the spring road relays – one of the most competitive club races on the calendar with international level club athletes competing for their clubs in many cases (we had our very own Nick Torry of course).

After setting up base camp in the sunshine the men’s race got underway at 12.00, competing over an updated, longer course than previous years: alternating long and short laps of around 8.9k and 5.1k. Also different this year was that the women were doing two long laps followed by four short, rather than six short laps. Their race got underway at 12.20 with AFD’s Emelia Gorecka soon pulling well clear of everyone else.

The men’s race had some close racing in the leading pack for the whole afternoon, with places changing in the top 15 even on stage 12. The women’s race got very strung out quite quickly however, and proved to be a bit of a time trial for most athletes, which was a shame.

All our teams moved steadily up the ranks throughout their races with all our runners putting in consistently strong performances. The last few stages of the men’s race were very exciting as we counted runners past to see if we were going to make it into the top ten. The gap between 11th and 10th was too great however and we had to settle for 11th, still our best result by four places.