Herne Hill Harriers under 13 boys placed a great 3rd team in the South of England road relay championship at Rushmoor Arena in Aldershot. Our bronze medal winning team was Sam Cohen, Tom Singhgolden, Callum Barker & Paul Burgess. After 3 narrow 4th places in the past 5 years, for the first time ever a young athletes team from the Club won medals at this high quality championships. At the other end of the age spectrum our M40 veterans team of Kofi Agyei, Keith Newton, Vic Maughn and Brian Wilder won silver medals and our M50’s team of Tom Conlon, Tony Harran, Steve Knight and Mike Boyle placed 5th.
In the U13 boys race, Sam put us in a good position with 15th place on the first leg, Tom improved to 8th on leg two and significantly closed the gap on the leaders, Callum ran strongly to move into 3rd place at the final changeover to allow Paul to chase down the two leading clubs, Paul increased the lead between ourselves and the chasing clubs but couldn’t close on two strong runners ahead. Sam, Tom and Callum were seperated by only seven seconds and Paul ran the 5th fastest leg of the race.
Our under 13 girls finished an excellent 9th after being 2nd after two legs (and halfway through the final leg) with Breagha Campbell the 4th fastest girl on the day and our under 15 boys were 13th with Sakariye Abdirahman finishing 4th on a strong first leg which placed him in the top 10 fastest runners on the day. HHH also closed teams in the other young athletes agegroups (Under 15 girls 63rd U17 men 33rd & U17 women 27th) – one of only a few clubs to achieve this feat.
Our M40 vets were comfortbaly beaten by a very good team from local rivals Thames Hare & Hounds, but we can be happy enough with team silver medals this year after we had won this title for 7 consecutive years up to 2009 only to fail to defend the title last year. HHH veteran men are back! Brian Wilder clocked the 5th fastest overall M40 time of the day and Keith Newton the 6th. Our M50’s returned to this race after a long absence to place 5th team, with Mike Boyle recording the 4th best M50 time. Our senior men fared less well, with our A team placing 23rd, which at least qualified us for the National road relays next month, while our men’s B team placed 47th of 69 complete teams.
Over in the USA, another HHH veteran, David Peters placed 8th in the sub elite race at the prestigious Fifth Avenue Mile, clocking a PB and very highly ranked vets time of 4.10.9.Dave said he had the perfect preparation going into this race – 10 days of waking up at 3am with jet-lag followed by 12 hours of customer meetings!.
HHH second claim runner and member of our BAL track team James McMullan won the gold medal at the Commonwealth Mountain Running Championship in North Wales. Another second claim HHH man, Chris Smith recovered from his recent collapse in the very hot World Mountain Champs to place 8th and both James and Chris were part of the gold medal winning England men’s team.