On a wet and windy Wednesday evening some of our Teens tick to the track at Swindon in the Mark Cawte Memorial Games (22nd March), some for the first time on a proper athletics track. The conditions were not conducive for fast times and Personal Bests, but there were some really good performances.
The races were graded by expected finishing time and so all of them were competitive, whatever speed one ran. By design, the fastest races were the last of the event series.
This meeting is quite early in the track and field season and so the event distances were therefore typical training distances rather than race distances: 300m, 1000m, 150m and 600m events ran in that order. We had entrants in all of them. Electronic timing was used so the times were accurate to a hundredth of a second.
Competing for Cirencester were Teens:
Ben Conway
Seb Compton-Evans
Archie Hatt
Evie Mence
Caitlin Musgrove
Jessica and Matthew Ross (from the Juniors)
Daisy and Mimi Van Wyk
Joining in, Juniors' and Teens' coach, Dorian Matts, ran the 150m and 600m.
The first race of the evening was the 300m, run in a monsoon, such that Archie's number on the front of his vest got washed away. But that did not stop him from crossing the line (right) first in a very quick 40.84s.
He followed that up, later in the top 150m race, by coming second, in a blistering 18.66s.
Not satisfied by running these two races, he ran the 600m, after a power failure lost all the floodlights for quarter of an hour, coming home 6th in 1.42.73.
We had four runners in the 1000m. Twins Matthew and Jessica (still only 10) ran in the first 1000m and finished well in 5th and 8th places in 3.56.84 and 3.58.81. In the second race, Ben (right) and Seb (left) ran in the second race finishing 8th and 12th in 3.35.58 and 3.45.63, respectively.
We also had success in the first 150m of the evening, with a 1 - 2 for sisters Daisy (centre) and Mimi (left), finishing in 21.60 and 22.59s respectively.
The coach ran in the second race, when the headwind was its strongest, so he asserts, coming 3rd in 25.43s.
Several of us ran the 600m : Caitlin, Evie (left), Archie (see above) and Dorian.
Results were:
Evie 2.05.00
Dorian 2.08.28
Caitlin 2.12.78
Evie's run was good preparation for her participation in the National XC championships, this coming weekend in Loughborough.
The Teens enjoyed the experience, despite the weather, and are already planning for the next Open meeting in April in Gloucester,