Herne Hill’s multi event star Thomas Ashby has got off to a flying start this season with some PBs at a number of open meetings and at the Woodford Combined Events Open Meeting he put together his best score yet for 10 events in 2 days of competition, improving his own club senior mens decathlon record by 256 points as he amassed 6,957 points.
Thomas had a good opening day aside from an indifferent long jump and began day two superbly with a PB 110m hurdles time of 14.66 and a discus throw of 48.67m. He will not have been overly happy with his pole vault, javelin and 1500m that closed out the gruelling two day schedule and will no doubt feel he should have exceeded 7,000 points for the first time. He finished an excellent 2nd place behind Greg Richards of Woodford Green & Essex Ladies.
This performance will rank him highly in the UK early season rankings and bodes very well for a later season all round improvement.
Tom’s younger brother Blade has now moved into the U20 mens age group and made his decathlon debut at the same event with U20 implements, hurdle heights and scoring. Although he will have been disappointed with an overall score of less than 6,000 points he will have learned much from the experience and with stronger throwing and a high jump much closer to his best would add considerably to his tally. He can also take great heart from 3 event PBs, including a fine 14.62 for 110m hurdles for his first sub 15 clocking over the U20 barriers, while he also ran PBs in the opening 100m event and the final event, the 1500m.
Full results are published on Power of 10:
http://www.thepowerof10.info/results/results.aspx?meetingid=50175