There was a fabulous turnout today at Sutton Park where our men’s senior team were part of 81 teams and 460 ultra-competitive runners in the National final of the Road Relays. In an incredibly fast start, with a lot of jostling our leg 1 runner Se Loughlin, one of the youngest in the field, more than held his own by taking 20 seconds off his time at Redcar to finish in18:01 and significantly ahead of some notable athletes.
As Se handed over to Joe Niven on 2nd leg the team were in 32nd place, the triathlete continued his excellent form from Redcar finishing in 18:06 and taking the team into 28th position. Chris Maher on leg 3 came through the woods in 19:40, another consistently robust performance against a very strong stage 3 field. To put it in context, in every leg there
LPS senior men’s team national road relay 2021
were at least 10 athletes who ran through 5k in 15 minutes or less. Chris came though the finish line in 19:40 and handed over to Jake Dickinson, another of Mark Bleasdale’s talented U20 athletes. Jake pushed through in 21:09, no mean feat give the field had really spaced out at this point and a couple of teams had back loaded their fastest athletes to legs 4, 5 and 6.
Our last 3 legs were all consistent, Jake maintained his pace and handed over to our leg 4 athlete, Chris Melling who kept the momentum and completed in 21:07 with a powerful run setting the team up for the last leg, which Thomas Harkin completed in a time of 21:47. Thomas, who had more power than my phone battery which died (hence the rean no video or pics of leg 6) took the team through to finish in 58th place – breaking the 2 hour barrier.
There’s a few videos of the race on our Facebook page “LPS Members Group”. You can access it by clicking here. Please like and follow the group 😊
Well done to all of those involved.
Kit Loughlin.
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