Almosts’ Amazing Achievements!

Race Report for 16 September 24 by Claire Hawes

Club coach Fiona Barnes certainly takes the prize this week for the furthest distance run! At 11am on Saturday she began the epic (or ‘really quite difficult’, as the organisers put it) Cotswold Way Century in Chipping Campden, finishing at Bath Abbey 29 hours and 11 minutes later! Fi was 7th woman overall. Huge congratulations to Fi, and thank you to all the club members who were there to cheer her on along the way and at the finish!

Another fabulous female finisher this weekend was Patricia Dendy. No stranger to these reports Patricia really excelled on Sunday at the Angels 10k, bagging her best-ever 10k PB time of 39:25 on what is a notably hilly course. Not only that, but Patricia was 1st female and claimed a County Gold Medal in the process.

Other Almosts completing the Angels 10k were: Nick Lewis in 40:26; Duncan Mounsor in 49:58 and Dave Elliott in 52:32.

To complete the trio of wonderful women runners, Ingrid Harris travelled to Devon for 100 Marathon Club AGM marathon and ran in first lady overall in a time of 3hrs 51min.

Allan Green also ran the 100 Marathon Club marathon (of course he did!), finishing in 5hrs 30. He’d run a marathon the previous Tuesday too, finishing The Otter Challenge at Kingsbury Water Park in 5hrs 49.

There was Half Marathon action going on this weekend too. Carl and Melanie Methven completed the Richmond Half in 2:04:25 and 2:43:32 respectively. Mark Wreford Bush achieved a 1min 36 second PB at the Worcester Half in a time of 1:37:6

This weekend also saw the Cheltenham Tri Festival triathlon at Sandford Park Lido. Neil Tring was first in his age category and 19th out of 201 entrants in the run part of the Sprint Tri.

There were of course plenty of Almosts at parkruns on Saturday morning. Adrian Courtenay was delighted with a PB of 29:01 at KGV, while Rich Smith scored his best parkrun time since lockdown, 25:20, at Wickford Memorial parkrun. Dave Nelson’s outing at Limavady was memorable for the wrong reasons as a pulled calf muscle will now keep him out of action for several weeks. Andrew Lloyd returned to his home parkrun of Pomphrey Hill and was happy with his time of 32:40 on that hilly course.

Other parkruns visited by Almost Athletes this weekend were: Kingsway, Southampton, Trelissick, Riverfront, Braunstone, Gloucester North, Worcester Pitchcroft, Thornbury, Chippenham, Burnley, Darlington South Park, Wotton, Cheltenham, Newent, Seaton, Keswick, Folkestone, Lydney, Rogiet, Clapham Common, Severn Bridge, Mallards Pike, Chipping Norton School, Zuiderpark (Rob and Alison Hume ticking off their ‘Z’ parkrun on the alphabet challenge!), Worden, Riverside Walk, and Zegerplas (Jakia Hussain and Leah Maddiss ticking off their ‘Z’s!)

Another busy and successful weekend for club members!