Adela highest TVH finisher at Southern Cross Country Champs
South of England CC Championships, Parliament Hill, 25th Jan 2020
Star of the day was Adela Svihalkova who finished a magnificent fourth in the Under 13 Girls Championships. All the more impressive as she had just returned from the Czech Republic after competing all week in biathlon competitions. There was no sign of tiredness in Adela’s running, looking very comfortable in fourth place. Finishing third was Woodford Green’s Abigail Reed who has won all her Met League races this season by a tremendous margin. This time she was only eight seconds ahead of Adela. Molly McCormack is another fine competitor, she had not trained all week as she had a cold but on the day her racing instinct came out and she had a great run to finish 78th. She can still run in this event next year. Likewise Skye Bishop is also under 13 next year. She also ran well to be only 22 seconds behind Molly. Our last scorer in the team which finished 14th out of 36 teams was Charlotte Brown. Well done to Charlotte, this is the first time she has been in the scoring team recently.
With Ava Levy, Maya Sutaria and Katerina Simakova close behind, TVH has a wealth of talent helping each other to improve. Eadi Solanki-Jackson has missed a lot of the season with growing pains so it was good to see her manage to finish a race in a good position. She was just in front of Anna Kelly who had had a better run in the Middlesex Schools Championships two days before.
It was pleasing to have a full Under 15 Girls Team finishing 24th out of 34 teams. Of those in front only three teams were in the Met League. First home for the Valley was Charlotte Edge (still U15 next winter season) in 94th place followed by Zenia Gordon who has moved up a gear this season and ran very well for her 132nd place. It is good to welcome Hedda Folland from Norway into the team. She has only had a few races and has been impressive in all of them and finished 9 places behind Zenia. Angel Acheampong who ran well in the Middlesex, didn’t do as well on the hilly Southern course but still sprinted home.
Our other team to finish were the Under 17 Men. Again with just four runners they performed well. Louis Hodge, who had won the Middlesex Schools Championship two days before came up against real opposition on this occasion. Even so, his 20th place was very pleasing. Then Daniel Benton also had a great run to finish 27th and Aidan Ferrand just pipped Shami Umashankar as they finished 139 and 140th.
We didn’t have full teams in the Under 13 and U15 Boys races due to injuries and illness. Cameron McConnon was first home for TVH in 57th place in the U13 race.
Senior / U20 Races: Six TVH women completed the South of England cross country Championships. Conditions were very tough throughout the 8km course at Parliament Hill. Overall the team was 19th out of 70 complete teams. Fantastic performances from Izzy Dye and Steph Ainlie who are both making an impressive return to running.
The Under 20 Women continued their fantastic winter, but unfortunately just missed out on team medals placing 4th. The team was led home by the two youngest members: Sarah Kebbell in 9th and Izzy Franco 18th both running superbly. They were backed up by excellent runs from Jasmine Gray, Jess Dring-Morris and Georgia Hanley.
First home for TVH in the Men’s approx 14km race was Chris Thomas having a strong run in 65th place. Michael Cameron had been just ahead of Chris but had to drop out due to illness. John Borton, Andrew Mitchell and Mat Chataway were separated by a few seconds at the finish. As well as Andrew we had another M50, Gordon Low, in the scoring team. Manuel da Silva was the final scorer finishing just 3 seconds ahead of James Malcolm, as has been happening throughout the season!
Full results at:
https://www.thepowerof10.info/results/results.aspx?meetingid=316177
Middlesex County Cross Country Championships report at:
Start Fitness Metropolitan League Alexandra Palace report at:
https://www.thamesvalleyharriers.com/start-fitness-metropolitan-league-11th-january-2020/