Saucony English National Cross Country Relays

Berry Hill Park, Mansfield

Saturday 3rd November 2007

Above: Len, Dave, Phil & Calvin. Surely this can’t be cross country? It’s not raining, the sun is out and there’s no mud.

B&R haven’t sent teams to this event regularly in the recent past and having failed to send a team to the recent Midland Cross Country Relays at Mansfield, Len was pleased to find three runners apart from himself to make the trip to Nottinghamshire. In the end he even had two others express a late interest in running, including Jamie Dancyger who offered to turn up after competing in the Special Olympics event at Oswestry in the morning!

Above: Calvin at the end of the very fast first lap.

With Dave Kesterton having run first leg for the club at the Sutton Park road relays and fancying a change, the other three of us looked at each other hoping that one of the others would volunteer to lead off. Calvin Scoltock was up for the challenge and lined up with the other 165 starters for the first 5 km leg. Conditions underfoot were good all round the lap and the pace was very quick. Calvin clocked 19:59 for the two laps to put the team in 150th.

Above: Dave Kesterton could have done with his shades on leg two.

Dave relished the chance to chase some runners and ran 16:56 ,by far our quickest time of the day, to pass nearly 30 runners and move the team up to 113rd (the rest of the improvement was due to some clubs only having a first leg runner).

Above: Glad to be running at last, Len approaches half way on leg three.

Team manager Len Quartly who confessed to being more nervous than before any other cross country race ran pretty well bang on his predicted pace to record a time of 22:31 and put us in 126th place out of 154 teams after the third leg.

Phil Anderson ran the last leg in 19:54 to bring the team home in a time of 1:19:22 and118th out of 143 complete teams (another 11 teams had dropped out after leg 3). Phil’s time was just a few seconds quicker than Calvin’s but Calvin puts that down to Len taking his time to cross the mat after tagging Phil!

All the team agreed that it was a great event, well-organised over a varied but fast course. The big advantage is that you don’t have to share the flapjakes with so many team mates. Definitely one that the club should look to support in more strength in the future.

For the record, Belgrave Harriers won the Senior Mens relay in 1:00:04 ahead of Leeds City (1:00:25) and Bedford & County (1:00:29).

Click here for full race results