Spring forward Weekend
A busy weekend for Tewkesbury Running Club with the main focus on Club Chairman Nigel Tillott’s Pendock Spring Chicken events. But first, the Poets Path Potter took place in neighboring Dymock.
Full details of how the event unfolded aren’t at hand however, we do know that five different events took place from 8 miles to 26+ miles. Social media suggest that Angie Sadler finished near the front of the marathon distance course along with Nigel Tillott – Nigel taking a fall en route, thankfully nothing serious too prevent him running straight to Pendock to set-up the following day’s events.
Noel Green, Jude Rodrigues and Roy Northcott were also taking-in the Daffodil Way as the sun shone down on the Northwest Gloucestershire corner. Race organizer in-chief Phillip Howells and his charity-raising partner Edward Chapman did a splendid job staging this popular twist to running.
Across to the East on the Cotswold ridge, Karen Maber, Stuart Dudfield and Cathy Dudfield ran in the Cleevewold 14.
Again blessed with outstanding weather, all three had fine runs and recorded impressive times but for Cathy; running the event for the third time, mystery surrounds how the popular ‘Spin Instructor’ became lost on the course? Consequentially, extra distance was added to her run and made a mockery of her finish time.
The weekend’s highlight was the Pendock Spring Chicken races; the main event being 10km with a 5km and a children’s 1km run to make it a great family day.
The 1 km event witnessed some exciting running from infants to juniors and probably the stars of the future Pendock events. The 5 km starred Nigel’s daughter Emma who claimed 3rd female with a time around 21 minutes. The 10 km race was part of the club’s 2017 Championship and there were some serious legs on display. Tewkesbury took 3 of the top ten places with Ed Hardy, John Gundy and Mark Parker – John winning the V40 category.
Suzanne Tharme was the club’s lead girl across the line while Russell Steele showed his strength to claw back Vlad Venglar over the last kilometer. Alec Vincent ran a storming race to lead both Steve Maber and Mark Gardiner back into the school playing field. Neil McFarlane impressed in his first outing for Tewkesbury and Wes Reid bounced off another Parkrun PB the previous day to complete another sound result.
