This January saw the return of the clubs “Member of the Month” award.
The year started with a new lockdown, and thus no official races, so the club improvised again with a new race series to keep members motivated during the cold, winter month.
Throughout the month there was a weekly challenge of 5k for members to have a crack at, in a 4-part series where time, age grade and most improved were all taken into consideration. Before we get to the results of January’s Member of the Month, I would like to say, on behalf of the committee, well done to all who took part and made the series such a great success.
The Nominees are as follows:
Joe Diggins. Joe had great success during the series achieving an unofficial PB of 18:27, bettering his official PB by 1m 35s. Not only was this the winning Men’s time, it was also the highest Men’s age grade with 73.78%, leading to two nominations.
Holly Durham . Holly had similar success on the challenge, despite preferring longer distance events. Mirroring Joe, Holly achieved both the fastest time and the best age grade (for a female) with a brilliant 21:25 and 70.46%, also achieving two nominations for her efforts.
Pete Storey. The next category in the series was the most improved, where we gave credit to the runners who had improved the most throughout the series. Pete put in a sterling effort throughout the series and was able to improve by a total of 1m 30s from his first attempt.
Sara Pask. Next in the most improved category was an impressive return to fitness for Sara Pask. With a lack of race fitness due to lockdown restrictions, Sara improved brilliantly each week with an overall improvement of 5m 04s.
Rick Dobbs. The final category was for the runner who had unofficially improved their PB by the most. There were a number of brilliant times entered, and quite a few PBs to boot. The most impressive for the men was Ricks PB of 2m 09s.
CJ Walker-Lees. Last but not least, CJ carried on from a brilliant year of running which included completing her first marathon, The Virtual London Marathon. Carrying her form in to 2021, she hit a big milestone with her first sub-30 5k, cutting 3m 21s from her time.
On top of these nominees, four members with notable achievements were added to the list of nominees.
Sam Clark for his first sub-19 5k, Mikey Brain for his first sub-20 5k (with no experience at racing the distance), Aaron Smith for his first sub-19 5k (on only his second attempt at the distance) and Vicky Hardy for showing an improvement throughout the month and managing a PB of 1m 12s.
Runner Up
Sharing second place, your runners up are Mikey Brain, Sara Pask and Vicky Hardy.
January Member Of The Month
Your winner of this month’s Member of the Month, for her incredible achievements, is CJ Walker-Lees.
Congratulations CJ on being January 2021 Member of the Month!