Another successful weekend for Birtley

The weekend started off with the first North East Harrier League match at Wrekenton. We had a slightly diminished squad since lots of our athletes were due to race on the Sunday, but we still did really well. The youngsters set the standard, with the U11 girls finishing first and second in their race (Poppie Phillipson and Izzy Hall taking the honours), and Ed Moon taking fourth place for U13 boys with only 9 seconds between him and first place. The U13 girls managed to get a full team out, finishing in 7th place, and both U15 boys and girls and U17 men were represented too. 
Senior women didn't quite manage a full team, but the three ladies who competed all did the club proud, and the senior men's team finished in a respectable 10th place in division 1, despite being severely depleted.  All results can be seen HERE.

Sunday saw 5 teams take part in the Northern Road Relays at Manchester Sports City. The teams all did well, with the men finishing in a high enough position to be invited to take part in the ERRA Road Relays on 8th October at Sutton Park. The stars of the day however were the U13 Girls, with Gary Curtis providing the race report below:-

To sum up today's performance. Kitty Graham was first leg “the racing leg” which proved to be the fastest leg. Early on looked like it could run away from us as the leader came out of the stadium with a sizeable lead but Kitty dug deep and ran a real hard race to keep Birtley 29 secs off the leader in 4th and 30 secs ahead of 5th place. Then came Olivia Murphy who went out of the stadium nice and smooth coming out about 200m off the leader but closing, she was chasing 3 as she went out of sight round the back of the Etihad to emerge a couple of minutes later in first place with an 80m lead, and to prove she hadn’t went off too quick she then finished the leg 42 seconds ahead of 2nd place. Then came Nell on the glory leg with the added incentive to overtake the boys and on she went, pushing all the time running 31secs seconds faster than 2nd place and finishing the race in style.
What makes me feel so proud of them is the way all 3 of them kept looking ahead and I never once saw them looking back wondering if they are going to be caught. Brilliant!!!"

Results can be seen HERE