The first Manchester League of the season is a struggle for us. We always have a clash with the local school race that we host and this year lost a good portion of our team to that. Nevertheless, we did manage to get an U13 girls team out and an U13 boy, with Thomas Egan finishing 20th in the U17 boys.

Dominic Gibson was our sole U13 boy and finished in 58th. You could see from his reaction at the finish how hard he had worked!

We just had enough U13 girls to finish a team, so they knew beforehand that they would be counters as long as they got round. They all did very well, with Esme Pearson our leading runner in 12th despite going over on her ankle. A great show of resilience! Also very impressive were Eleanor Nicholson (32nd) and Charlotte Stansfield (34th), both having moved up to the U13s this year. The field was of 75 and as we know, getting a top half finish in one of these races isn’t easy. Overall they finished a very respectable 8th out of 19 teams. We know this squad can do a lot better as we have around 15 U13 girls training together now as a group. Hopefully things will take off more in the 2nd race, when we’ll also be able to see how successful we’ve been at putting together an U11 team for this year.

AJW

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