The Summer Grand Prix - dissected!
The seventh Summer Grand Prix series has now finished and the following stats may be of interest to someone out there....
75 runners took part in at least one Grand Prix event – one less than the record figure set last year.
Only Tony Maddocks and Kevin Payne finished every one of the seven races – one of which was the Club Championships.
Paul Brown – who won the series – Amy Turner, Darryl Roe, Lee Walker, Barry Allsopp, Caroline Hasson and Micky Todd competed in six of the seven.
Twenty-six runners took part in only one race.
Nineteen Women runners completed at least one race – a drop in the numbers who competed last year.
The best-supported race was the first race of the series when 41 athletes finished the race. The least-supported was the July 7th race with 24 finishers.
There were 6 different individual winners of the 2-mile Rising Sun runs: Lee Walker, Mick Baker, Jenny Sexton, Mark Black, David Rowe and Ruth Marshall, while Mark Fenwick and Donna Horne won their respective Club Championships, defending titles that they’d won in 2008.
Mark Fenwick’s 9.56 in Race 7 was the fastest Mens time of the series and a new course record. Joy Fenwick twice equalled the 12.23 course record for Women runners.
Kenny McPherson’s 10.40 in Race 4 was the fastest time by a male veteran runner, while Chrystal Skeldon’s 13.07 in Race 3 was a new course record for veteran women runners.
The narrowest margin of victory was in Race 5 when Mark Black in first and Joanne Holmes in second were both credited with the same time. The biggest margin of victory was Jenny Sexton’s 1min 12secs gap ahead of Martin Telford in race 4.
The four fastest Senior Men:
M Fenwick 9.56
T Carter 10.23
L Phillips 10.27
C Mitsides 11.21
The 4 fastest Veteran Men:
K McPherson 10.40
P Hilton 10.54
D Embleton 10.54
C Guy 11.22
The 4 fastest Senior Women
J Fenwick 12.23
D Horne 12.24
V Hindson 12.36
A Turner 13.07
C Willis 13.07
The 4 fastest Veteran Women
C Skeldon 13.07
E Walton13.10
J McCullough 13.58
E Moir 14.04
Two of the races were re-arranged due to clashes with other fixtures.
Ian MacDougall was the solo timekeeper and starter for each of the Rising Sun races.
Five ‘Daves’, four ‘Lees’ and four ‘Chris’s’ (or Chrys!) took part in the series.
Next year, only the best four scores will count from seven races.
The top ten and the fastest male and female runners will all receive a trophy at the annual awards ‘do’.
Only one person got lost on the way round.
Summer Grand Prix
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