It’s November, welcome one and all!
Here at CARC we’ve rounded out October in the best way possible; running! It’s been a busy one for our runners this week from the return of the Croft Winter Training Camp, to Halloween Parkruns and our England Athletic’s ‘Lift The Curfew’. There’s a lot for us to catch up on so let’s get to it!
We had 6 Juniors join us for this week’s training at Wigmore School on Monday evening. Their first of the season where they needed to bring their running torches! With the session a little quieter than usual, due to half-term perhaps, our young Crofties focused on practicing their relays in two groups of three.
As for our Senior runners, their only training session took place on Thursday. (Tuesday’s was a little different, we’ll get onto that in a roly mo!) This week, Eric coached the session, testing out our runners sprints around Wigmore School field. The windy weather may have made their efforts a little bit harder!
This week, England Athletics and This Girl Can collaborated on a safer running initiative; ‘Let’s Lift the Curfew’, where clubs all over the country were invited to host their own social runs to raise awareness of the campaign. As a committee, we chose to hold ours in Leominster, inviting Croft members and non-members to join us! In total we had nearly 50 runners turn out (despite initially advertising an incorrect postcode!) with some running 5k, others 10k and the remainder walking. Overall, it was a very successful evening. We are very happy to have played our part in EA’s campaign.
Moving onto Saturday, and it was a busy one!
Starting off with Parkrun and despite there being a big cohort of our runners currently at camp, we still had plenty of Sky Blue rep at different Parkruns. In Ludlow, Halloween dress-up was the order of the day. Eric dressed as Batman and Oli, donning his bells, as a Morris Dancer. As for the results, Batman would finish 1st overall with a time of 20:02 – that’s the palindrome challenge finally completed on the 5k app! Steph K was our first female, 4th lady overall, finishing in 26:45, less than 10 seconds off her PB! There was more spooky fun for Emma J at Hereford Parkrun. She finished in 33:12.
Also racing on Saturday were Patrick and Ireland who took part in the Black Beacons Mountain 50k Race involving a South to North crossing of the Bannau Brycheiniog. According to Ireland’s Strava, she finished in just over 9 hours, after climbing over 8,000ft of elevation! Official results were unavailable at the time of writing.
Elsewhere, Saffi competed in the National Cross Country Relays in Mansfield, also on Saturday. She would run against older girls, aged 14-15 years, but this didn’t stop her finishing 37th overall in what looked like a busy field! Her team finished in 45th position. Max, her mum, told us: “It was a lovely day. Very windy and cold but it was mostly dry.”
Onto Sunday and Eric was out racing once again. Unlike the past two weekends where he ran marathons, this week was a little less demanding, distance wise, with the Richard Burton 10k down in Port Talbot, South Wales. Eric would finish in 11th place, with a time of 34:24. He said: “Glad to see there is still some top speed in the legs despite the marathon prep and racing lately. Just gave it my all and see how I did and finished just outside of the top ten. Can give the legs a bit more TLC next week, with nothing big on the horizon!” Also, this is such a cool picture of Eric chasing down Olympian; Clara Evans. Kudos to The Runs Podcast for posting it on their instagram page!
Despite being in Mansfield on Saturday, Saf headed over to Sheffield on Sunday for an indoor track event at the English Institue of Sport. She finished 2nd overall in all heats with an indoor PB and straight for some fun at the fun fair afterwards!
Of course, we’ll be rounding out this week’s update with the Winter Training Camp. This year’s event took place near to the Blorenge in Abergavenny, with over 20 Croft runners packing their bags and heading down there for the weekend. As always, amidst the running and yoga, there was plenty of laughs, giggles, games and food, from what I have heard! We’ll get pictures and videos posted to Facebook in the next couple of days and maybe, if we’re lucky, one of our merry campers will write a little report for us. I may have to do some sweet talking first!
Well done all! Please remember that if you would like your race and achievements included in the weekly report, please get them to me (Bronwyn) by 6pm at the latest. Any that come in after, I cannot promise they will be included. The upcoming training schedule will be live on our Facebook on Monday morning. In the meantime, don’t forget, we’re always on the look out for your race reports for the website, so get posting them on Facebook or send them to either Sam H, Huw or myself (Bronwyn).