On an old fashioned cross country course with woodland, hills, mud and fast trails that was new to all of our guys we came away pleasantly content with Team Bronze medals despite the absence of stalwarts Rich Munn and Chris Greenwood.

The front end of the race was top class as Phil Wicks of Belgrave, recently 9th in the Euro Trials, built up an early lead that he was never to lose but he had our own John Gilbert and Dean Lacy of Cambridge Harriers in close pursuit. Lacy built up a 20m lead over our man before John clawed him back and then gained a lead of 30m. The ding dong battle continued right until the end when Lacy, who is in great shape at the moment, just edged in front on the downhill finish. Given that John has started late this year then with three more weeks training under his belt he has a great chance of reversing the result in the Kent County Champs on Jan 7th.

With both Jim Savage (25th) and James Connor (14th) using this race as a comeback, despite both being nowhere fully fit and James losing 7 places because of a lost shoe, we were down on our usual score with 3 men in but good runs from the evergreen Steve McGrory (28th) and fast improving new recruit Jack Wilson (38th) partially made up for this.

Our last scoring man Andy Morton (41st) had to overcome a bad hangover that eradicated his usual storming finish but he hung on well to close the team and secure richly deserved Bronze Team medals.

We had just the necessary 12 runners to compete in the 12 to score competition, with particularly good runs from U20’s Calum Fraser (54th) and Su-Min Lee (55th), and a good day’s work was completed when we discovered that we had come 2nd in that competition before a good sized group finished the day in a hostelry in Putney.

Ken