National Road Relays

Great day! Winning the National 12 stage relay, breaking the club record and sending Captain Sharp off in style.

It was one of those rare days where you get the 'dream team' out and fit which doesn't happen to often for relays with people's jobs, injuries and other factors coming in to play. At breakfast with a few hours to go we knew if everyone held it together we could brake the club record which was full of quality athletes like Paul Evans, Spencer Barden, Graffin brothers etc., so as like most relays the sentence of 'every second counts' was the message we took from the team talk.

James Kelly did his job and came home in the pack and where we needed him to be setting off fellow welsh man Steve Davies, even with a tight hamstring we knew he would move through the field like he did. Meanwhile fellow RunnersLife athlete Mark Draper was looking strong as usual but took a tumble, which hampered his attempt at sub 14 for the short course. On to 3^rd leg and one of the big three on our team took to the roads (Mark Miles) he churned out a sub 26 run and put us in to the lead which is where we stayed for the rest of the race, although I gave everyone a scare!

After Sharpy had increased the lead I was up, I saw Keith Gerrard in the starting area so knew he would be chasing me with a 26second gap. I felt terrible as I started and when I got to the hill I couldn't seem to get going or find a nice rhythm. All the way to the turn I just felt like I was struggling badly and at one little hill thought I was going to stop! As 'Gerrard' finally caught me just after the turn I jumped on to the back of him but after about a minute I was starting to cruise and felt great. I am not that confident at the moment though and I should have pushed on much earlier but decided to just hold fire. I just kept putting off making a move for fear I would blow up and didn't want to ruin the teams chances as I knew who we had coming up. At the bottom of the climb I pushed a bit but he responded...so I pushed again and just about brought us back in the lead for Goolab and the rest to put around a mile between second place and us by the end.

Of course Wicks had a great run and is flying at the moment but the whole team put a shift in and all the guys including the great effort of the 'B' team placing in the top 25 worked really hard. I was very impressed with Dan Mulhare at the end, its not easy to keep going when you know how big the lead is and it was important to brake the club record so we needed him to keep pushing.

Phil Nicholls looked smooth around the course and helped his team to a Bronze medal while Newham also had a good run which I believe was also a club record and one of the Beagles Chris McKay even joined the Belgrave boys on the night out!

simx