From Petra Bijsterveld…
The Yorkshire Veterans’ Athletics Association Road Relays 2025 took place at the relatively new (2022) Wyke Community Sports Village in Bradford, which contains a cycling track, football pitches as well as a nice pavilion with changing rooms. The track has an inner and outer loop, with one lap of both loops totalling just under a mile. The race was for teams of 3 runners who each had to run 3 laps (2.75 miles), and hand over a baton between runners, with the timing chip being in the baton.
Thanks to Sally Armitage’s encouragement we managed to get two ladies’ teams out today. Team F35 was made up of Sally Malir, Caroline Howe and Sally Armitage. Surely these runners are all perhaps a little older than 35 I hear you say?! Well with the female age groups defined as 35-44; 45-54; 55-64 and 65+ we had no choice, Caroline being under 45 forced the whole team into the F35 category. The second team, F55, contained Jane Bryant, myself and Diane Kitchen, slightly less spread out in age, though both Diane and I are well into our sixties. Anyway, this was not going to spoil our fun, we were realistic enough to know we were not necessarily there to win trophies.
Despite the prospect of possibly being a little way down on the results list all six of us gave it our very best efforts. We had a solid warm-up and explored the track. The connections between the outer and inner loops initially looked confusing but after a helpful explanation from a marshal we got to grips with it and it was actually a nice circuit to run. Not dissimilar to the Brownlee track known to many from the Leeds Evensplits races, but hillier than we had imagined and there was also a fairly stiff breeze making it a bit harder too. In fact the purple gazebo belonging to City of Hull took off across the grass just before the race commenced and had to be chased after by the Hull runners!
Once the race started at 2pm, men and women running together, it was immediately clear this was a fast field, and I spotted lots of familiar faces of speedy runners from other clubs such as Holmfirth, Bingley and Saltaire. All six of us worked really hard, no one dropped a baton and the handovers were as smooth as you could wish for. In the end we gave a good account of ourselves. The F35 team came 5th out of 11 teams. In fact so nearly 4th: Sally Armitage, running the last leg at a blistering pace, was just pipped to the line by an F35 runner from City of Hull, there is one second (!) difference in the total team time. The F55 team came 4th out of 5 teams.
We all enjoyed it, especially once it was over 🙂 Personally I find the short distances always much harder and more painful than any of my long ultras, but they are good to do, if only to prevent myself turning into a runner whose only pace is the ultra-shuffle!
Hopefully we can get some more teams (and some men!) out at the next opportunity.