Southern Men’s 12 Stage Road Relay 2008 held at Rushmoor Arena, Aldershot on Sunday 6^th April

Wells City Harriers Senior Men’s team recorded their best ever result in one of Britain’s classic road relays, won by the Manchester United of Athletics, Belgrave Harriers.

The relay consists of 12 athletes per team each running either 8.4km (2 laps of the course) or 4.2km (1lap) a total of 75.6km (approx 47miles). The Wells team took 4hrs 15min to finish in 7^th place and gained automatic qualification for the National Final to be held in Sutton Park ,Birmingham in three weeks time.

The team were led off by new recruit Eliot Haimes who has had a good season on the cross country circuit this year and hopes to transfer this good form onto the roads. After a steady start on the first lap, he began to move through the field to bring the team home in 10^th recording 27min 17sec for the 8.4km lap just over a minute behind the leaders who at that stage were Thames Valley Harriers.

Street’s Jack Bancroft (a second year student at Exeter University) was next away, running a short leg (4.2km) Jack who was carrying an injury to his foot still managed to get around in a very respectable 14min19sec to keep The Harriers in 10^th.

Leg 3 saw the return to racing after a 3 month break due to a shin injury of British International Ben Tickner. Ben approached this race with caution, running the first lap slower than the second for a negative split, recording 13.35 and13.14 for an overall time of 26min49sec to bring the team up to 6^th. Club stalwart and overall Street 5k champion, Andrew Deamer ran well on stage 4 to record 14min 42sec and hung onto 7^th place.

British marathon star Adrian Marriot ran stage 5 and, although his legs were still tired from his exploits of last weekend when he won a half marathon in Switzerland, he produced the quickest long leg of the day for the Wells team and 10^th quickest overall. He also ran negative splits of 13.27 and 13.15 for an overall time of 26min42sec to bring the team back to 6^th.

Matthew Lewis, competing for the club for the first time in this event, did well to keep his nerve and ran a steady 14min and 58sec for stage 6 dropping back just two places to 8^th. Stage 7 saw the Club’s flying doctor, Andrew Hennessy, storm back through the field to close on the leaders and bring the team into 5^th place. This was a commendable run from Andrew considering he has been injured since January with a torn hamstring and has only recently been able to resume light training. His time of 27min4sec was the third fastest for The Harriers. The oldest man on the team ,one of the stalwarts of the club, Steve Masters from Glastonbury, found the fast pace of the short leg quite demanding but hung on well to run 15min10sec finishing 7^th.

The first of the 3 members of the team who are due to run in the London marathon next week, Alan Jones, took over from Steve at the start of leg 9. Under instructions not to push too hard, Alan started steadily and like the previous long leg runners ran a negative split of 14min 30sec and 14min13sec (28min 43sec overall) to bring the team back up to 5^th. Jon James, who was due to run a long stage, was not feeling well, so instead ran the short leg 10. In the circumstances he performed incredibly well to maintain 5^th position and ran the fastest short leg time for the team - 14min8sec.

The last two runners for the team, Jon Gilling and Dave Stanfield, are both in their final ease down for the London Marathon .Jon ran a steady 30min8sec for leg 11 to drop just one place to 6^th whilst Dave rounded off a good day for the Harriers with a solid 15min5sec for the final short stage bringing the team home to their best ever finish of 7^th.

Good luck to Alan, Jon and Dave who will join several other Harriers this coming Sunday morning to take part in the 27^th running of the London Marathon.