A couple of weeks ago an email arrived in the “juniors” inbox from the coach of Pudsey & Bramley Juniors Club, suggesting a virtual race between the two clubs, each runner to run for 15 minutes, distance run in 15 minutes to count.
Was it a suggestion or was it a challenge? Richard Irvine accepted the challenge of recruiting a Valley Striders Junior team and a date was set – juniors should run any time between 6a.m. Friday and 6pm Sunday on the weekend of 15th to 17th of May.
Each runner would do a 15 minute solo time trial – they needed to run as fast/far as possible then upload a Strava or similar screenshot or photo of GPS watch for verification of the distance they had run.
With regards to the route, there was only one rule. It could not be all or predominantly downhill. Apart from that it could be the runner’s choice be that road, grass, track or off road. Safety was essential!
The rules to determine the team competition were discussed and agreed:
- 2 age categories based on school year, Year 6 & below and Year 7 & up
- Teams of 3
- The top 3 finishers in each category from each club become their A team, the next 3 the B team etc
- Teams can be boys, girls or mixed
- Scoring system – the club with most distance in the A race scores 10 club points, the winning B team scores 9 points, winning C team 8 points etc.
- If a winning team has less than 3 runners it scores a number of points pro-rated according to the number of team members, e.g. if the winning E team has 2 runners it would score two-thirds of 6 points (this way everyone can count even though a club may not have an exact multiple of 3 runners) (and if you’re confused by this, take a look at the results as it has two occurrences of this).
Oh yes, you want to know the results.
It was a close thing in the older juniors category with Pudsey and Bramley winning 22.7 to 19.0. In the younger juniors category Valley Striders won 27.0 to 11.0. Although this seems a large margin, if any one of the VS “C” team had run 110 metres less it would have been a 19-19 draw!
There were 23 Striders juniors (well done all of you!) and 30 P&B juniors who took part.
Click here for the full results table.
A return match is planned for the weekend of 6th and 7th June.