Race Report – Athletics Victoria XCR’18 Round 6 – LAKESIDE:10 -Sunday 22 July 2018

3km & 10km Road Race Championships.

Our first morning race of the XCR’18 winter season of road and cross country running, had our distance runners heading to Albert Park and Lakeside Stadium.

The road course was on Lakeside Drive which was closed to all traffic.

The runners were required to run 2.5km out and 2.5km back, which the 10km runners did twice and then finish with a 300m lap of the track inside Lakeside Stadium, which was a great way to finish a road race.

There was a fairly strong northerly wind blowing so the out legs to the south with the tail wind were quite a bit faster than the back legs coming back into the head wind.

Luckily it was a bit warmer than last year when we did this race, which was a bonus for our runners and supporters.

We had fourteen female runners, four of these were juniors.

And we had twenty-seven male runners, nine of these were juniors.

A few highlights of our female runners :-

Great to see five women go sub 40 minutes for the 10km, this gave the team five finishers in the top 53 places, which is great in a very competitive race.

Our division two runners did so well, with an average age of less than 24, they were competing against much older and experienced runners.

Even better was the two runners finishing in the top 10, Charlotte Wilson in fourth place and Emile Guy in eight place.

These two runners are both having fabulous seasons to date.

Our open women will remain on top of the ladder and with four rounds to go, hopefully they will win the division two premiership and gain promotion to the open women premier division for XCR’19 next year.

A few highlights of our male runners :-

Good to see that they filled three open teams, sadly the premier division and division 3 teams are both still struggling to avoid relegation, so the club needs many more men to head to the last three XCR’18 races to attempt to stave off possible relegation.

A strong run for third place by Liam Adams, it looks like has almost fully recovered from his 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games marathon back in mid-April.

A fantastic run by Mason Scott, third in the U20 division and second fastest ESS male runner on the day. This is Mason’s last year as an U20 runner and he will be a very valuable addition to the open men’s team in XCR’19. And his U20 team finished in second place with great runs from his team mates, Matthew Sostaric and Zach Mottram.

The U16 team finished in third place, ably led by Lachlan Attard who finished fourth across the line.

And a big P.B. to Don McLaren, he took over four minutes from his 10km P.B. which was set in this same race last year. He went under the hour for the very first time. That certainly is a lot of hard work done in the last twelve months to get that huge improvement.

Next race is round 7 of XCR’18 at Lake Wendouree, Ballarat, on Saturday 4 August. All open men and women will run 15km and all juniors will run 6km.

Don’t forget to get your entries in for this race if you haven’t purchased the XCR’18 or max. package, they close at 11:59am on Wednesday 1 August 2018.

RESULTS

written by Stephen Murphy.