Men’s newsletter – February 2024 | Great Bentley Running Club

Well, I’ve well and truly gone and shot myself in the foot haven’t I? Having written about our February Half Marathon in January’s newsletter, what am I going to say this time around? Luckily, there’s plenty to say, because you lot have been doing all the hard work and putting in the miles.

February’s races

First up was the last XC fixture of the season at Hadleigh, which saw 15 of you turn out and make sure we kept our place in Pool A. There were some great performances throughout the field, and I thought Justin Hayhoe and Gethin Hughes put in particularly strong performances on the day. However, I wanted to say well done to each and every single one of you, and to everyone who turned out throughout the season. As I said in the race report, next year is already looking like one where we’ll need another strong turnout from everyone to take on the larger clubs, so I’m looking forward to seeing even more blue shirts on the start line for the 2024-25 XC season.

Elsewhere, we’ve seen plenty of strong performances at parkrun, including from young newcomer Flynn Eyre who smashed out two very fast parkruns at Clacton seafront, and people taking on all distances from 10k’s to marathons.

Looking ahead to April

AGM:
It’s our AGM on Wednesday 3 April which will take place after training at Great Bentley Village Hall. It’s a great opportunity for new members to meet the committee, hear a summary of everything that’s happened over the past year, choose officials for the year ahead (nominations for committee roles are now closed as of 1st March), and have a chat about life at the club. Please do come along.

Essex Road Relays:
We are putting together teams for the Essex 5k Road Relays at Colchester Sports Park on Sunday 7 April. And when we say, ‘we’, I mean Meera and Lisa. I’m not involved at all, so I’m sure it will all go without a hitch.

You can see the full details on the ATW website, but there are two men’s races with the vets setting off at 12.15pm and the Men’s Open event starting at 1.30pm.

To sign up, just email Lisa by Thursday 14 March with your full name and date of birth. You’ll need to let her know whether you were born in Essex or have been resident in Essex for over 9 months. Don’t worry, you can run either way, but she just needs the information for the entry forms.

Runner of the ‘Month’

(please skip paragraph one completely if you just want to find out who is ROM)

As you’ll have seen from last month’s email, I have a pretty fluid relationship with the concept of time. Afterall, as Dr Sam Beckett once theorized, imagine every day of your life is represented by a single piece of string. At one end of the string is your birth, and at the other your death. Now, imagine tying the two ends together to create a loop. If you were then to scrunch up that loop of string in your fist all the days of your life would overlap and cross with each other in a random sequence. Still with me? OK, so Dr Sam Beckett used this theory (it’s more of a simile really) to step into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanish, I, on the other hand, am going to use it to name our Runner of the Month for some awesome performances in February and (early) March.

This month’s Runner of the Month is Gary Cooper who really has been putting in some fantastic performances at parkrun, starting with a new course PB of 30:42 at Harwich parkrun on 17 February, followed by a new overall PB of 29:59, again at Harwich parkrun, a week later. Since then Gary has also taken seven minutes off his 10 mile PB at our interclub race with Harwich, which he finished in 2:09:14.