NEWS

Round 7 XCR ’19 and Run Melb

It was a weekend of long distance racing with the AV 15Km road event in Ballarat and Run Melbourne Half,10k and 5k on Sunday.

Damien Bruneau continued his great form, collecting his 2nd medal of the winter; His time of 50:49 for the 15k put Damien in 59th place overall for a 2nd in the 40 -44 division. His time was 68 seconds faster than 2018. Damien is training very hard in preparation for the Melb Marathon.

Samantha Gates continued her impressive debut season with 31st place and a 15k PB of 59:29, leading in the Essendon women.

Another big improver (pardon the pun) is Don McLaren. He finished towards the tail of the 15k field but his time of 1:29.25 was a whole 5 minutes better than 2018 and an incredible 13 min better than 2 years ago! Linda Fitzgerald (1:19) and Glenda Morris (1:34) who train with the Red & Black rec runners, were very pleased with their times.

Essendon wasn’t well represented at Ballarat but Charlotte Jackson (U14 5K) and Brodie Andrews (coming back from illness), both impressed. Our lack of numbers saw our men’s Div 1 team made up of mostly 40+ runners while the men’s Div 3 team had plenty of 50+ as well as more 40+ competitors.

Sunday produced near perfect running conditions to try out the new Run Melb course. The course had enough up hill sections to test out everyone. The early starters tackled the Half Marathon course. We were well represented by Michelle Roberts and Danielle Stasinowski and others from the Red & Blacks also taking on the 21km.

Emilie Guy won the Women’s 10K in 36:16, which was faster than her Albert Park time a couple of weeks ago. Emilie finished 12th overall from a field over over 5,500.

Another super run came from new member, Brodie Thrum. Brodie finished 6th overall in 34:18.7 and easily won his U 16 division. Brodie is part of Mark Carey’s Gisborne squad

Others to tackle the 10k course were John Cooper (8th in his division) and Ian Newey, still recovering from multiple injuries.

And we must mention Christian Knox who ran the 5Km race in 27 min. Once again, Christian volunteered to be a guide for a Visually Impaired runner. Christian regularly volunteers his time to assist VI runners at parkrun and other events. Well done Christian!