Mansfield Harriers hosted their traditional end of season Open Graded meeting at Berry Hill Park last weekend where several strong performances and personal bests were witnessed.
A highly competitive Javelin event with 21 competitors saw Sheffield AC athlete Luke Peters, who trains at Mansfield, throw just 7cms short of his personal best to reach 61.31 metres.
His younger brother Tom threw a new PB of 48.16 metres retainin
g his number two UK ranking at Under 13 level but moving within one metre of the UK’s leading thrower.
The quality competition inspired others and Mansfield’s father and daughter pairing Steve and Becky Woolley both threw new personal bests.
Becky’s new distance of 35.75m moves her up to fifth place in the national rankings at U15 level and Steve’s 38.73 moves him into eighth spot in the VM45 national rankings.
Chris Ashmore also recorded a new PB with a throw of 36.33m.
Mansfield’s top three 400m runners decided to move up a distance and test their legs over two laps and were led round by the club’s leading 800m runner Chris Brown.
Brown came home in 1:56.7 and dragged the trio on to all record sub two minute times. Sam Cordin’s time of 1:57.0 ranked him as second fastest U20 in the East Midlands this year whilst Paul Wright and Martin Cook both recorded PBs of 1:57.1 and 1:59.3 respectively.
Brown moved on to the 400m next winning in 50.0 and in the process spurring on Adam Sansom to a new PB of 52.2.
These two then moved on to race again over 200m where, despite slipping in his blocks at the start, Sansom took revenge winning in 23.7 with Brown just a 10th of a second behind.
Matt Woolley was fastest athlete home in the 100m, winning in 11.6 seconds, and became the first recipient of the John Tomlinson Trophy.
Birthday
This new trophy was presented to recognise the 80th birthday of the Mansfield official and coach who has given over 60 years service to Mansfield Harriers. John himself came down from the judges stand to present the trophy.
Stuart King ran a season’s best of 9:08.0 in the 3000m and this encouraged three other Mansfield athletes on to best performances – Luke Marshall clocking 10:10.3, Tom O’Mara 10:54.2 and Daniel Ward 11:09.8.
Elsewhere there were good end of season performances from Rachel Gair in the Hammer, her best throw of 59:04 just 78cms behind her personal best and from Christie Childs, recording 60.5 in the 400m and 2:20.4 in the 800m.
U13 Sam Johnson clocked a new PB of 2:33.0 in the 800m. and under-15 David Lagerberg ran strongly in the 400m to record a time of 54.3 secs.
Meanwhile as the Olympic action kicked off in Beijing, Mansfield Harriers’ senior league team made the trip to Stoke for the last fixture in this season’s Division One programme.
With a weakened team due to injuries and holidays Harriers did well to finish fourth on the day retaining their third place spot in the overall league table.
The full article contains 555 words and appears in Ashfield Chad newspaper.
