Late summer Madness

In June of every year Phil starts mumbling that he hasn't done anything about the Madness yet and we all avoid eye contact and someone quickly changes the subject.......but somehow by the second Saturday evening of August everything comes together and the Maiden Newten Madness is a resounding success without us having to do anything........it's magic!

This year the weather was perfect, the entries were up, we had a new results system which (phew!) actually worked, the cakes were fabulous, the marshals were outstanding.......and 128 runners hopefully enjoyed every inch of their 10k "and a bit" race.  It was great to see lots of familiar faces - support from Yeovil Town RRC and Egdon Heath has been marvelous every year - but also lots of new faces too in the 9th year of the event.

One of the new faces (I may be wrong, but I don't think we've ever had any Bridport Runners do the event previously) was Ben Renshaw - not content with winning the first of our Poundbury 5k series back in June, he proved that it wasn't a fluke and was the comfortable overall winner of the race in 40.01. Obviously now he has to come back next year and run it 2 seconds faster!


Alan Chiverton from Westbourne AC (or Wimborne if you're Phil doing the results without his glasses on) came home in 2nd place with Edward Gibbs from YTRRC taking 3rd place.

The winner of the ladies race was another new face, Jenny Guard from Leeds City who finished in an excellent 13th place overall and was only 27 seconds outside the course record set in 2009. In 2nd place was Lynn Hutchings from Wimborne AC and in third place, taking the FV55 prize was Carol Jones from Ealing Southall and Middlesex AC - who  also came 4th on a previous visit to Dorset in 2009. The other female vet category winners were Rose Harvey (FV35) from Yeovil Town RRC, just taking it easy tonight after winning last year's event and Sandra Hood from Weymouth St Paul's Harriers was first V45.  Weymouth St Paul's also produced the 1st junior female home in 53.39, Holly O'Flannagan.

The male category prizes all went to local clubs - Egdon Heath Harriers took the MV40 prize (Steven Horsler in 42.49) and MV50 (John Cook in 45.06) and Yeovil Town RRC's Nick Brooke took the MV60 prize in 43.42 despite the distance being about 40 miles shorter than he usually runs......

I must just finish by saying that despite my flippancy at the beginning, we all know that Phil and Jackie put a huge amount of effort into making the race a huge success whilst the rest of us just stand around trying to look as though we have some purpose in being there.  We have a lot of support from non runners/members who year on year get roped in to help us out and do so willingly and cheerfully - being a small (but perfectly formed!) club we would not be able to stage the event without their help, so a big thankyou to all of them too.

Next year will be an all-singing, all dancing 10th anniversary event, so please come back and run it again and bring some club mates and friends with you because in 2014 Phil is going to start that muttering at least a month earlier in preparation........................

Results will be posted shortly on the Full On Sports website (there will be a link from the MNR site) and we have a huge selection of photographs which will be on the MNR Facebook page later this evening...if they EVER finish uploading.