On Saturday morning it was all the excitement of the Stour Valley Path 100, a challenging 100K ultra-marathon which starts at the Memorial Hall in Newmarket and follows footpaths close to the River Stour, all the way downstream to near Manningtree in Essex. It started at 7am and had a maximum allowed time of 15.5 hours with checkpoints and refreshments along the way. Martyn Taylor (11:37:08) of Newmarket Joggers was among the intrepid 138 starters and came home an impressive 17th of 99 finishers. This beat his previous best time in 2015 by just 28 seconds, so lucky he didn’t stay a little longer at any of the checkpoints! Gillian Green and Isabel Vicente opted for the 50K race starting at Sudbury at 1pm and were among 132 competitors. Vicente sadly had to retire with muscle cramps but Green soldiered on and made it to the finish in 8:35:54, 119th to cross the line and well within the time limit of 9.5 hours, so a great achievement. It was a very gruelling race, especially towards the end in the darkness and rain.
Up at Rugby, Daisy Glover (37:29) had a tremendous run in the Draycote Water 10K, finishing 1st female of 111 and 5th of 238 runners overall. That was the day after finishing 1st female in the Rotherham 5K parkrun in a time of 18:36, equalling the women’s course record at that venue.
Meanwhile down in Hertfordshire, Simon Harris (39:39) and Alex Cairns (40:55) ran well in the St Albans 10K, finishing 26th and 35th of 479 competitors.