Just 18 of us ran in this year’s Club 10, those that didn’t missed out on a great race in bright sunshine. Well done to Dylan Beaver of Dartford Harriers for winning and to David Reader who was second and winner of the Club Championship, he gets to keep one of the finest of the Club’s trophies for the year. The silver and bronze medals went to Peter St Amour and Christian Poulton.
The prize for the first lady went to Anoushka Johnson of Dartford Harriers (yet again!) and the prize for the first (albeit only) Cambridge lady went to Susan Edwards. As Susan said afterwards, it is not often that you win a prize even though you came last but there you are, you have to be in it to win it!
This year we had introduced a new competition (with a slightly less magnificent trophy) for the best performance over all three of our Joyden’s Wood races. I had developed a complicated system for comparing performances in the different races whereby the time for the 5 mile gets multiplied by 6, the 7.5 by 4 and the 10 by 3 but in the event the maths wasn’t really needed as only three of us completed all three races and of those Christian finished ahead of the other two in all three, so he gets to keep the new (or at least re-badged) “Joyden’s Wood Trophy” for a year. For the record, and so as not to let my spreadsheet go to waste, the scores were as follows:
Finally we took the opportunity to present one of the Club’s more distinctive trophies. The “John Finlay Trophy” (more commonly known as “The Rock”) goes to the Club’s most successful fell runner of the year (as calculated by an algorithm that makes my system for the Joyden’s Wood Trophy look like child’s play). That too went to Christian Poulton, and for the second year running, with silver and bronze medals going to Clem Dixon and Ian Marshall.