June 2009 – Cowgrove 4 mile Time Trial
With building work in progress at QE
this month’s time trial had to be re-routed. This led to a slightly
shorter course. Under the circumstances it was likely that if any of our
fast runners put in a performance a fastest-ever time trial time would
be achievable. Both Guy Thompson (23:31) and Anthony Clark (24:06) went
faster than the record of 24:45 set by Jerry Shield last month. We can’t
know for sure whether Guy would have beaten Jerry’s time over the old
course, but clearly, with being over one minute inside the previous
best, Jerry’s time would have been, at the very least, under serious
threat!
Despite the heroics from this pair of
greyhounds, they were not the first to cross the line. This honour went
to Dave Higgins, a friend of Pete Carr’s, who was running with us for
the first time. With no previous recorded time, he was allotted, what
turned out to be a generous handicap, but his run of 27:22 was a great
debut over an unfamiliar route.
It wasn’t just Dave’s handicap that was
out. An accumulating miscalculation tended to work in favour of our
faster runners. When the system works perfectly the first runner over
the line is the one who has made the greatest improvement in time. On
that basis Paul Hougham’s fantastic improvement of 4.5 minutes ought to
have been enough to land him the trophy.
There were many other great
improvements too, even allowing for the shorter course. Well done to
Dave Black, Kev Elliott and Maddy Vaughan-Johncey, all of whom went
inside 30 minutes for the first time.
It was Teresa Grist who suffered the
most from the miscalculated handicaps. Although she finished in the
final place, she had made a dramatic improvement of almost two and a
half minutes. Well done, Teresa.
Well done to all those who took part,
and thank you to Bob Caines who does not appear on the time sheets who
acted as guide/pace runner. It was great to see Paul Mallett back in
action after an injury lay-off sensibly taking it as a steady run and
also not on the timing sheet.
Thanks to our team of
timekeepers/recorders – Denise Craddock, Jeff Hinsley, Ian Kennedy and
Paul Teck.
Full results for the time trial were:
June 2009 – 4
miles – Cowgrove route
