Hot on the heels of the C19 Relay Challenge, Halesowen’s army of self-isolated athletes took their virtual racing to the next level by taking part in the inaugural Virtual National Road Relay Championships.
The competition provided all the traditional fun of the Sutton Park event, only without the traffic woes, dodgy changeovers and mass start chaos of the real life race!
Our team of virtual athletes swung into action, finding the fastest legal route and recording some speedy socially distanced and super safe 5k runs.
10 Halesowen men and 2 women broke the 20 minute barrier, with Peter Dear (17:03) and Katrina Simpson (19:29) running the fastest legs.
Sam Morton recorded the highest age grading score of 79.73%, followed by Tom Kenderdine (79.45%) and David Lewis (79.05%).
An honourable mention goes to Peter Barks who briefly managed to defeat the computer system and go top of the leaderboard with a WORLD RECORD time of 12:37 … before someone at OpenTrack realised and quickly hit the CTRL-ALT-DEL buttons.
Here’s the individual time breakdown for Halesowen athletes along with the overall finishing positions as submitted to the official website:
MEN WOMEN
859th Peter Dear 17:03 1962nd Katrina Simpson 19:29
1150th Joseph Rogers 17:39 2122nd Sarah Thompson 19:51
1263rd Jonathan Lewis 17:55 2580th Samantha Morton 21:11
1361st Andy Yapp 18:06 2672nd Mel Hepke 21:31
1390th Tom Kenderdine 18:09 3062nd Sally Spencer 23:08
1406th Roger Mallard 18:11 3164th Lucy Cambridge 23:47
1552nd Dave Turvey 18:28 3407th Bettina Wolf 25:49
1703rd Adam Cross 18:49 3409th Emma Higgins 25:50
1763rd David Lewis 18:57
2171st Glenn Lacey 19:59
2290th Matt Allen 20:19
2646th Mohamed Cusworth-Yafai 21:26
2837th Alex Morgan 22:07
3092nd Rob Weaver 23:17
3170th Steve Horton 23:51
3217th Peter Barks 24:10
3443rd Paul Allen 26:18
3464th Steven Millington 26:30
3603rd John Evans 29:11
In the team competitions, our women’s vets team produced another stellar performance, finishing in 20th place in a time of 2:15:17.
The men’s over 50s were 26th in 1:30:39, and the men’s vets team were 40th in 1:52:31.
The senior women’s team were 58th in 2:08:57 and in the full 12-stage men’s senior race, Halesowen finished were 93rd in 3:45:01.
The full results can be found on the OpenTrack website
https://data.opentrack.run/x/2020/GBR/vnrrc/
The winners of the sweepstake prediction competition will be announced at the Jack Price Arms Zoom meeting next Wednesday night (15th April) from 8.00 pm.
This will include a few unofficial times which were not included in the official results and we will see the saga of Mark Hadley’s long-running and ultimately futile attempt to submit his results finally draw to a close!
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