Craig Smith
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A good turnout for The Newburn River Run with 12 Harriers from a field of 283 finishers. The race was run in cool but wet conditions and it rained or drizzled steadily throughout the race. The course was well marshalled and run mainly on flat tarmac or gravel track surfaces. The return section on South side of the river was quite undulating and muddy given the heavy rain that had fallen during the day. The course is labelled as 6.5 miles and I measured it as 6.55 miles on my GPS.
Best Heaton finisher was Les Smith who continued his great recent form coming in 8th overall and was second within the over 40s category with a time of 38:25. Well done Les. The race was won by Ian Harding from Morpeth in 33:34. First female was Jane Hodgson from Morpeth in 40:46 who was 24th overall.
Full results are at http://www.elswickharriers.org.uk/Newburn River Run Results 2011.xls
A good turnout again from Heaton at this week's Newcastle parkrun. The course took a different route as The Hoppings was occupying part of the course. The modified course avoids the gravel sections after Gate 2 and around the Military Museum which makes it more popular that the standard route.
Outstanding Heaton performance of the day has to go to Junior Jonathan Howard who completed the 5k course in 19:04, coming 19th overall and the 17th male. Another great run was from Ellen Tullo who was 3rd female and sub-20 minutes with a time of 19:59.
This was to be my third London Marathon courtesy of the club places available to members who had missed out on the public ballot. The train journey to London didn't go well with major delays and overcrowded carriages due to cancellations. However, on Saturday morning, the ritual of getting the Docklands Light Railway to the Excel Centre to register and collect my number began. The expo was very good this year and was already very busy whe we arrived at 10am. Number and various random giveaways in hand (well actually in the large and incredibly unwieldy kit bag runners are given), my family and I had a great day relaxing in Greenwich.
Arriving at Blyth Quay at 9:00am, it looked like we were in for a glorious day. The sun was out, it was cool and there was no wind. Jo and Guillaume Zoppi had just arrived. Sam Daley, Mark Likeman and Dave Wright were nearby too and the four of us went for a warm-up around the first part of the course.
By the time the race was due to start at 10am, the wind had picked up and it looked like the first half of the race was to be run into stiff breeze. The race started with a whistle and the front pack went off very quickly as runners streamed through the road section of the course. There was quite a lot of bumping and the broad start funnelled onto the narrow pavements.
