3 Counties XC Race 1- Wellingborough

A new season and a new venue, with WDAC moving from the typical Croyland Park venue, to Irchester Country Park. Admittedly, a slight eyebrow was raised to the location, which has a lot of tarmac and hard core paths, but actually there were some very nice twists and muddy hilly sections to add in a little more challenge to the park run venue.

Pleasingly ORs came out in force with a record number of 29 runners turning up for a lovely sunny morning. This alone should be celebrated as a great feat, perhaps the most important, but also the men's team produced an outstanding performance to hit a record high 4th place with not only all of the men's top 8 (8 runners count for points) finishing inside the top 80 with more still inside the top 100 showing the strength in depth of the men's team that turned out. There were some great individual performances to note, with the return of Matt Dicks executing a masterful performance to secure the outright win, John Risby and Terry O'Cleirigh getting 2nd in age cat despite missing out on scoring for the team, and a great debut from Tom Baggott finishing 38th.

And whilst not everyone scored for the team, those great performances still go a long way to playing 'defence' in the words of the great David O'Connor as they push scoring runners in rival teams further down the leader board.

It was a big turn out all round for the first race with nearly 500 runners across all clubs, and it was a strong showing on the ladies side with over 200 runners. This did hurt our fortunes, with most of our turnout on the men's side, the ladies', normally our team's backbone, had an unlucky day.

We move on to the next race at Delapre on November 26th! 4 weeks to prep... be there!

Full results can be found at:

http://www.threecountiesxc.co.uk/3CXC_Fixtures.html