Hello and welcome to your newsletter for June. Sorry, there’s been a bit of a delay in getting this out to you, but on the bright side, we are now well into July so I no longer need to include reminders about our Friday 5 (it was very wet and not without incident), Ekiden (it was fun and our mixed open team won their category) or the Geoff Day 5k (postponed due to the footy).

The one date I do want to remind you all about is Saturday 27 July when we have a double whammy planned – Rendlesham Forest parkrun in the morning and our Men’s XC meal in the evening.

Rendlesham Forest parkrun

As always, anyone is welcome to join us at parkrun for the ‘R’ in our GBRC of summer tourism. Rendlesham Forest sounds like a wonderful mixed terrain course, and hopefully it will be another sunny Saturday morning. The parkrun weather fairy has already blessed us with some glorious weather for our trips to Great Notley and Brentwood so please feel free to join us. I also think it will be parkrun #250 for me (as long as I can make this Saturday morning) so do come along to help me celebrate this milestone.

Men’s XC meal

For this year’s XC meal, we’re heading to the Gurkha Restaurant for a curry and beers at the Odd One Out.  We’re meeting from 6.30pm and walking to the Gurkha for 8pm.  It’s not too late to join us if you want to – just let me know so I can make sure we’ve booked enough space. There is free parking at the Gurkha Restaurant or just opposite the Oddie (only 60p after 6pm) for those planning on driving.

What about June?

Right, enough of this social stuff, let’s get down to business with just some of June’s highlights:

1. Martin Cotton, Alan Johnson and Peter Reeve took the top three spots overall in the Micky Edwards series.
2. Jon Mann won the Valley of the Owls Half Marathon, setting a new course record of 1:31:07.
3. Paul Arnold and Tom Higgins took on the Stour Valley Half Marathon, whilst Tim Clifton and Malcolm Statham completed the full 27+ miles of the full Marathon.
4. Jon Mann (10 laps), Tom Higgins (8 laps) and Paul Davison (6 laps) represented the club at Craig’s Summer Solstice Challenge with three solid performances.
5. Rob Dyer and Paul Davison made the impromptu decision to run a marathon at the Orwell Challenge the night before the race and managed to do it in the fantastic time 4:35:37.

Well done all of you.

Runner of the month

Once again, deciding on our runner of the month has been another tough decision.  As you can see, Jon Mann has been tearing up the trails all month and Tom Higgins nearly nabbed it thanks to his performance at Stour Valley, not to mention setting a new 5k PB at Micky Edwards and then completing his first-ever marathon at the Summer Solstice Challenge.

However, just like in Highlander, there can be only one, and this month’s ROM is going to someone we haven’t even mentioned yet. This man started the month off by knocking over two minutes off his course PB at Boxted 10k, where he was very close to winning his age category, set a new 5k PB of 18:55 at Micky Edwards, and laid down more fantastic performances at Harwich 5k (19.04) High Easter 10k (39.49), Bury Friday 5 (32.50) and Horndon-On-The-Hill 10k (39.58).  What a month! Congratulations Stephen Bullen you are Prince of the Universe Runner of the Month for June.