SOUTHERN 12/6 STAGE ROAD RELAYS
Herne Hill Harriers’ Senior Men’s and Women’s teams produced brilliant performances at the Southern 6 and 12 Stage Road Relays at Stantonbury Stadium in Milton Keynes, mixing individual brilliance with a real show of team strength. For the Men, the race consists of 12 legs alternating between long legs of 8.6K and short legs of 5K. The Women compete over six legs, two being long legs and the remaining four short.
Our Women have had an outstanding winter and continued this success with silver medals. Sophie Tooley put us contention for medals from leg 1, producing one of the fastest legs of the day in 16:53 to finish 2nd on her leg. Margaret Coogan ran leg 2 where her strength from marathon training came to the fore as the race progressed; Margaret clocked 30:47 to hand over in 3rd place. Bryony Proctor kept us in a podium position with an 18:28 leg, with Molly Smith then moving us to 2nd with one of the fastest long legs of the day in 29:44. Soraya Lockwood, on her road relay debut for the Club, kept us in 2nd place with an excellent 5th leg, 18:18. Helena Keenan continued her brilliant run of form on the anchor leg, clocking an excellent 17:26 to secure silver medals for the team.
Our Men demonstrated their depth and consistency with our A and B teams improving by circa 4 and 3 minutes respectively from last year. Our A team finished an equal highest ever 5th. Our B team were an outright club record 15th overall, and 2nd B team.
On an individual front there were fireworks from Sam Bramwell who set a new short leg course record of 14:13. Alongside road 5K PBs, Sam has established himself as one of the finest exponents of relay running in the country. There were sub-27 long legs from Tom Austin and Ollie Mills in 26:45 and 26:54 respectively. Our B team included some really strong runs and underlined the depth that was evident from our second place Surrey League B team finish, with the fastest legs coming from James Nutt’s 15:59 short leg, and debutant Ollie Sweett running a 27:37 long leg.
We are now preparing for the National at Sutton Park on Saturday 11th April.
Keith Newton