Gala Harriers in League Action Again
February 9th, 2003Dunbar was the venue for round four of the Eastern Borders Winter Cross-Country Series on Sunday. There was another good turn out of runners, although there were one or two important faces missing from the Gala team.
It has to be hoped that they were not suffering too much after the club’s farewell Indian night out for club treasurer Paulette Ashford-Smith, who is moving down with her family to Wiltshire next month.
One who did make it to the start line was Martin Clarke, who showed no side effects form his curry and fairly ‘blasted off’ at the start of the race. Unfortunately those left wilting in his wake at the start soon recovered and Martin had to be content with a respectable 11th place finish. Selkirk pair Jack Knox and Alistair Laurie raced each other all the way round with Jack just managing to hold off Alistair at the finish to come in 6th and 7th respectively.
Other finishers were Robin Murray (17th) and Charlie Roberts (30th). Usually 24 points would be good enough to win the team prize but with Moorfoot Runners having finishers in 2nd, 4th and 9th places, their 15 points total meant that Gala had to be content with second this time.
Laura Howie ran her best race of the series so far to win the ladies race. Laura took the lead at the halfway stage when she passed Isabel Knox (Hunters Bog Trotters ) and Marbeth Shiell (Carnethy ) and made full use of the following wind to pull away steadily from them to finish in 25th place overall.
In the junior race Gala had three boys taking part. Highest finisher was Steven Laurie (6th), this puts Steven in a very strong position in his age category but he will have to run really well over the next two races if he is to beat Craig McInnes (City of Edinburgh ), to retain his U13 boy’s title. Running in the same category was Craig Learmond who is improving fast and finished (25th), with Caled House also running well to finish (20th).
Scottish internationalist Suzanne Carson was on representative duty on Saturday, running for the East District team in the Reebok Inter-Counties Cross-Country Championships at Nottingham. Suzanne was not overawed by the top class field of runners around her and ran an excellent race to finish 115th out of 297 runners in a time of 32 minutes over the 8km course.
Next races for the Harriers will be on Saturday at the Carnethy 5 Hills race and in Grangemouth on Sunday for the very popular Round the Houses 10 km road race.
