As we start a new season and dive feet first into Spring marathons and Summer League's beyond, it's worth taking a moment to celebrate everything that is giving Postal Harriers reasons to be cheerful right now.
We had a great cross country season with our ladies and men's teams celebrating promotion to the next division. Some stand out performances with Dom Carter frequently hitting the top ten and Lou Mamalis not too far behind in the ladies rankings.
We've just seen a huge attendance record at the 500th York parkrun with over 900 runners and walkers taking part. You always get a spike in attendance at an inaugural event so if you check the stats for York parkrun #2 you will see a mere 94 turned up. The icing on the cake was the fact that Dom topped the rankings, claiming his 2nd first finisher spot around the Mire.
We've got runners aplenty taking part in the Spring marathons that will result in a flurry of activity on the Whatsapp group on Sunday mornings over the next few weeks. Turn it to mute if you want a lie in! Congrats to Louise Boaz and Mark Fenton for starting us off in style at the Paris Marathon yesterday. Manchester, London, Boston (Lincs) are coming soon. The highlight for me being that fact we have 5, yes 5 runners taking part in London. Have we ever had that many before? Billy says not so I'm going with that. Good luck to everyone taking part and show off your Postal colours on the day.
Summer is coming. Allegedly. I'm guessing we're all sick of rain and ready for some warm rays to help us round those 10K routes starting in Tadcaster later this month. We've got plenty of speed demons ready to challenge the overall and age group placings. Who will be our shining stars?
Last week's Cooper Test. Sounds simple. A 3K ish steady jog to start from Coach Whitby. Whenever did he allow us such a gentle introduction to a session! Then came the test. 12mins to cover as much ground as you can, taking in several cattle grids and more muddy puddles than your typical episode of Peppa Pig. Performance of the night for me was Chessie Bell, completing 2.91K in the time. Impressive stuff Chessie and 3K is within reach if we do this again on a windless Knavesmire.
May brings us the Hardmoors relay. 6 Posties are sharing 200 miles between them starting with the Wolds Way followed by the Cleveland Way. There are loads of individual runners taking part but only 3 relay teams at present so bronze is in the bag assuming we finish but can we do better?
A bit of a boring one but we're not a club without it. The AGM is on 10th April as promised and we will endeavour to hold it on the second Weds of the month from here on. We have a few vacancies on the committee, which we will talk about at the AGM. Thank you to all committee members for the work you've been doing to help us meet the 7 England Athletics Club Standards. Some of these will be mandatory from next year so it's simple, we've got to do it. And it's the right thing to do.
Over 60 of you have renewed as first claim members, thank you!
The minute you start a list you're guaranteed to miss something obvious so to those great performances that I've forgotten, I apologise.