Hi ladies! Hope you had a wonderful festive period and wishing you all a very Happy New Year. December is typically a little lighter on the race calendar, but we’ve still had plenty to keep us busy and bring us together. We’ve given out awards and club champs, admired the village Christmas lights, got puzzled by pavements and cracked out the festive fancy dress outfits for parkruns and races. You could say it was a ‘cracker’ of a month!

NEWS AND NOTICES

Awards Night – winners and nominees

Our annual Awards Night was a really enjoyable evening – thanks to all those who attended and voted, and congratulations to all the winners!

Our female winners were:

• Female Newcomer – Sarah Blewden
• Female Performance of the Year – Norma Smith
• Michael Sommerlad Award – Fiona Gosling
• Most Improved Female – Lisa Briggs
• Female Runner of the Year – Lisa Briggs
• Female Vet of the Year – Magdalena Komorowska
• Rodger’s Trail Run Series Female winner – Vicky Presland
• Geoff Day 5k – Magdalena Komorowska

It was also wonderful to see just how many different people were nominated in each category. It was a new suggestion from our members for this year to display the nominations on the screen, and definitely one that we will be continuing in future.

If you couldn’t make it on the night and would like to look through our celebratory ‘through the year’ photo montage, you can find it here. Please also get in touch with Paul Davison if you have an award or club champs to collect, so he can arrange to get it to you at a training session. Don’t forget you can start submitting club champs times for 2024 too!

Interclub 10 mile race – Sunday 7 January

Thanks to those of you who have offered your assistance to Tom to put on this event. It would be great to see lots of you out taking part too. It’s a nice course, you’ll get lots of cheers from our supportive marshals and it would also be good to beat Harwich in the friendly inter-club team match!

The race starts at 9.30am, with registration taking place 8.45am – 9.15am, at Great Bromley Village Hall (not Great Bentley!). You can find more information on our website.

NESS Cross Country (XC) League

Our ladies finished in a fantastic third place at the GBRC fixture of the NESS XC League on 10 December. However, the club is currently sitting in 5^th place (out of 6 clubs) in Pool A of the league, so we really need a strong turnout at the final two fixtures of the season.

These fixtures are coming up on Sunday 21 January (Wix) and Sunday 18 February (Hadleigh). Don’t forget you can come along even if you haven’t taken part in XC before. Look out for instructions by email from Vicky before each fixture.

Great Bentley half marathon – Sunday 4 February

Another thank you to those who have volunteered for this event, and congratulations to those who had their names drawn to run. The lucky ladies are: Debbie Smith, Magdalena Komorowska, Donna Harris, Zoe Reynolds and Emma Levett-Welham. I hope you will soak up all the support from the volunteers and have a fantastic run.

The volunteers who are not running will receive an update by email from Mel, the Event Director, with more information about their role on the day.

Save the date – Essex Road Relays – Sunday 7 April

I know lots of you enjoy this team event, so just wanted to let you that Essex County Athletics Association have confirmed that it will take place on 7 April this year in Colchester. We don’t have any further details at this point but as April is a busy month for racing, we wanted to confirm the date if you wish to keep it free. 

Ladies’ social

Meera and I are very much aware that we’re overdue a social, so we’ll be arranging another parkrun and breakfast soon. Watch this space!

TRAINING

Head Coach Caroline has circulated the new Winter training schedule (which runs to the end of March) by email with this week’s google form, and it will be added to the website shortly.

A couple of things to note:

• Mondays will see a rotation of Manningtree and Clacton venues, offering hills in Manningtree and alternating speed and hills sessions in Clacton, until the evenings get lighter;
• On Thursdays at the track, Paul A and Fraser (aka Ant and Dec) have planned 6 weeks of sessions to improve your 5k time;
• Vicky’s Friday morning runs will return in March with the lighter mornings.

OUR LADIES’ SQUAD

What we did this month

In the freezing, wet and windy conditions (sometimes all 3 at once!), you ‘Beat the pudding’ at Witham Boxing Day 5, raced the riders around Friday Wood, navigated the Twixmas Trail and Elves 11, and completed tourist parkruns aplenty.

In XC news, Mags Komorowska, Kathy Bishop and Kelly Hayhoe represented us at the Vets XC Championships at Writtle. A large number of you ran or marshalled at our NESS fixture at Hilly Fields, plus we had our first 3 ladies ever out running in an Essex XC League event, also at Hilly Fields.

Four of our ladies travelled to Malaga to search of better weather, and came home with four fantastic half marathon times. Tonie Wilson even came second in her age category, an amazing achievement in a race with thousands of runners.

Runner of the Month

This lady has started marathon training with a vengeance and had a busy festive period, with appearances at the ‘Boxing Day 5’ and the ‘Twixmas Trail’. She also made light work of the Pavement Puzzler earlier in the month, showing off her solo self-navigation skills. 

We all appreciate her not just as a valued runner in our squad, but also as our fantastic Head Coach who arranges our busy and varied club training schedule and leads excellent sessions. We are so lucky to have her.

Our ‘Runner of the Month’ is Caroline Searle!