Merry Christmas and a Happy, Healthy and Successful New Year

Happy Christmas from all at Herne Hill Harriers and hoping for a fantastic New Year with many more HHH success stories like those in the News and Headlines sections on this site.

Sunday morning saw 14 teams of 3 contesting the HHH Christmas Road Relay on Tooting Common using 2 laps of the parkrun route for each leg, c. 3km per leg. The great majority at this fun event were young athletes with one or two parents and also some not quite so young athletes in their 60s and Steve Knight in his 70s.

Jeff Cunningham ran the fastest time individual time and the clear team winners were U13 Dylan Gillies and U15 brothers Warren and Alex Wilson. Second place were U15 Sophia Sahai, M60 Mark Bebbington and U17 Robin Bebbington with the third team being David Phillips, Esme Fillingham and Keith Collins Achong.

Then on Tuesday evening we had the HHH Christmas Cracker track relay which consists of teams of 3 taking turns to run 200m each as many times as they can in 20 minutes. There were 16 teams of 3 runners each on the track with again mainly young athletes, but a few senior members and one or two parents participating.

As was the case on Sunday morning on the common, the Wilson brothers in the same team were again unbeatable, this time with Jacob Alley as their third team member as they covered just over 18 laps between them in the allotted 20 minutes with their alternating 200m reps. It was a close race for second place between three teams which went to a combo of Nick Seccombe, Jon Key and Harry Bell, with the third team comprising Freddie Hake, Jon Goldston and Archie holding on ahead of Phoebe Bowen and two Davids.

Geoff Jerwood