Team Blizard Race Report
Well, what a week of results we have had including “Super Sunday” which could have been replaced with “Sunny Sunday” but more about that later.
We have had so many of the team racing over the weekend so we start off by saying massive well done to all of you and please forgive us if we miss you off the report as this can only be a snapshot of the results or else it would turn into a book of “War and Peace” length with the results we need to cover!
Kicking off the week’s racing on Thursday saw the inform Richard Burke run well in the Higham Hurtle 5 mile race.
The Quayside 5k in Newcastle provided a fast course for Shane Grace and Romany Tune in this popular event.
Friday night saw an excellent performance from recent Portugal attendee Scott Burrell who equalled his personal best time over 5k in the London based Battersea Park Under the Lights 5k.
Much nearer to home saw the next round of the excellently organized Curly’s events in the Yorkshire Wildlife 10k where young Lucas Davies once again set a new personal best time and there was a fine run from training partner to many of us in Dave Varley who took the V60 win!
Moving up distances to the half marathon we saw a fine performance from Matt Wroe to finish 7th place overall in the Coventry trail half marathon in an excellent time for this undulating trail event.
We have four marathons to cover now and we start off in Iceland where another Portugal attendee put the warm weather work into good practice as we saw Laith Flanagan place an excellent 6th overall in the Iceland marathon.
Next up on “Super Sunday” was Shaun Carley who raced the Blackpool marathon in windy conditions but still managed an excellent time under 3.00hrs and enjoyed a bit of rock later in the day!
At this time of year we often can see a shift in the weather as we change seasons and for marathon runners who were doing these races the forecast of hot weather on Sunday did impact times so people should not beat themselves up too much with their ability to hit a certain time as the hot weather certainly does not help over 26.2 miles!
The Manchester marathon was held for the first time on the same day as London yet both races sold out which shows how popular the marathon has become once again in the last few years.
With so many doing each race we will try and summarize the “eye catchers” starting with Cleethorpe’s athlete Dean Thomas who broke the massive 3.00hrs barrier for the first time as did recent lactate test David Millar.
It was fantastic to see coached athlete Rebecca Friar demolish her marathon best time and stop the clock in an impressive 3.10hrs and not a bad result from a former track 800m runner!
Other notable performances came from a couple of the training group in Natalie Neville and Andrew Kitchen.
Moving “darn south” to the London marathon which also saw very hot running conditions as well and world record number of finishers in the mass race.
Top of the roll of honour goes to Danny James who ran a superb race to sneak into the top 100 finishers with an incredible 2.26hrs.
Another notable performance came from coached athlete Richard Ward who took an incredible 40 minutes off his precious time to stop the clock in 3.00.07 so next block we need to work on his finishing sprint to get him under that barrier!
In no particular order there were sterling runs in very hot conditions from Michael Skelton, Dawn Bradley Brad Walker,Michael Whole Grain,Tamara Hazlehurst, Angela Lally, Ruth Muir ,Warren Nixon, Malc Stapleton, Adrian Ennis, Wayne Singleton to name just a snapshot of the huge numbers that ran.
However, as always we each week award an athlete the “Run of the Week” for their outstanding performance.
This week it is a joint award to a couple of athletes for very different reasons who deserve the accolade.
Long time coached athlete Keri Pearson will be the first to say that her last few marathons have not gone well for one reason or the other but coach Tune worked on a new strategy for her in this block that Keri applied herself to fully and Sunday’s massive new personal best is testament to her perseverance and commitment to the process and we could not be happier for her.
The other joint “winner” is another coached athlete in Leeds based Mark Chapman who back in January was just recovering from a stress fracture in his foot and we knew he could not put the miles in required so devised a plan to cross train to keep his fitness levels high while only running 3x per week with 2 of those runs being very short and a gradual increasing long run.
Mark stopped the clock on Sunday under 3.00hrs to execute a remarkable training performance which he should be very proud.
Once again a massive well done to everyone who raced and please ensure you are fully recovered before training hard again…..until next week keep training!
