Harriers go out with a bang at Yeovilton!

The Exmouth Harriers ended the Yeovilton Summer 5k series on a real high last Wednesday, 11th September, as the 4 participating Harriers on the night came away with 3 personal bests and a season's best between them. As an additional bonus, one of them won the ladies race on the night, whilst the other got a prize for 2nd senior female in the series overall.

The fast, flat Yeovilton 5k series has seen the emergence of a new Harriers starlet, in the form of Carly Miller. Last month, Carly smashed her PB for the distance by well over a minute when she ran a superb time of 21:35. She was paced around on that occasion by experienced veteran athlete and local running legend, Gordon Seward. Nevertheless, Carly still had to run it herself and push her body way beyond its comfort zone to get that time. In this final round, Carly was totally on her own and wanted to prove that she could run a sub 22 minute time on her own. Knowing how hard now she needed to push herself to achieve this, she set out hard from the gun and dug in deep all the way to the finish. To her sheer delight, she not only bagged herself another sub 22 clocking - something which, until last month, she had been chasing for ages - but she knocked yet another 10 seconds off her time from August to register a fantastic new PB of 21:25. She placed 9th female and 76th overall. It seems that Carly has found her specialist distance in 5ks. As just reward for her efforts, her 5 accumulative performances secured her the 2nd senior female prize for the series overall. Fantastic work Carly: very well done!

Carly's was not the only outstanding female performance of the night, as Cathy Newman made her debut appearance at Yeovilton for this 2013 series and made her one appearance count by storming to a win in the ladies race and placing 32nd overall in a time of 18:32. This time is not only a season's best for Cathy but it also beats her best performance from last year too - she recorded a time of 18:42 at the September round of the Yeovilton 5k. Whilst this is a long way off Cathy's astounding PB of 16:14, it comes in at a whopping 91.6% on age-graded calculations and puts her as 2nd in the UK for her age group for the 5k distance this year. Amazing stuff indeed!

Not to be outshone by the ladies, the two male Harrier representatives stormed their way to new 5k PB times on the night too. When you are at the sharp end of the race at Adam's Miller's level, it becomes harder to carve large chunks off your time and you find your grappling for precious seconds. Everything has to come good on the night - the weather, your fitness, good health, fresh legs - in order to clock a new PB. Luckily for Adam, everything did come together and he was rewarded with his 3rd PB of the series with a superb time of 16:37. This gave him 13th place overall in a very tight race, in which just 10 seconds seperated the runners who finished 8th through to 13th. 

The biggest improvement curve of the series in terms of times, however, has come from Jon Garrity. Jon opened up his Yeovilton campaign back in April with a modest 19:16. One month later he improved upon this by a whole minute to run 18:12. In July he dipped under 18 minutes for the first time ever with 17:51. August saw him post a consistent 17:52 and then, to finish the series in fine style, he knocked another 6 seconds off his time and posted 17:45 to claim 22nd place overall and 6th in a very competitive MV40 category on the final night.  

At the prize giving, there was yet more good news for the Harriers as I, Ellie Sutcliffe - although having only managed 2 of the 6 races due to injury - managed to post the fastest female time of the series (in the June round; 18:15) and picked up a £50 cheque as a nice little bonus. Second claim Harrier, Tom Merson, also did the same for the men's race. 

About 170 runners contested each race, with as much as 40% of the fields being female. Competition at the top end is usually very high and so these are good races in which to tuck into a pack and have the benefit of other athletes to pull you along to a PB. All of us who participated would recommend any 5k PB seekers to give the event a go next year!