County Juvenile Even Age & Novice Cross Country Championships (newport)

This day could not have come soon enough for our endurance squad. Cross country contrary to popular opinion is like your favourite onesey or favourite slippers. It just embraces the senses and all life's little niggles and problems just melt away for a couple of hours at least. Some of us live in that world permanently and cannot understand the non believers.

Today was day one of the county cross country championships in Newport and it was plain to see that the Newport committee had put in a lot of hours getting the course ready. They even organised a nice sunny day to top it off. It was a tough hilly course which suited us perfectly to show off our early season conditioning.

We had three U10s two girls Emma Beresford-Miller and Jane Quigley both running very determinedly for top 20 finishes. Then the slightly more experienced Donncha Browne ran out of his skin for second in the boys race.

The three U12 girls Anna Paxman 8th, Lilly Duffy 9th and Mairéad O'Brien 12th ran very well considering they are more track stars than Xc stars.

Diarmuid Moloney came up a year to finish 3rd in the U14 race and is starting to be noticed as the races get longer as he is an endurance machine. Tom Bergin running his first race for the club finished 7th in this race also and will be a force to be reckoned with going forward.
It's said a picture is worth a thousand words and it's true also in sport where having our more experienced athletes demonstrate how it should be done is worth any amount of coaching. So our newbies on the day u10s and U12s were able to experience the hearth warming sight of Ruairí Walshe winning his U12 race and in the process beating the hot favourite Charlie Tobin of Newport. Also U12 we had new to the club Dillon Bergin 6th and the returning Mikey Ryan 7th both running really well.

We also had Cian Hodgins, Tom Walshe and Seán Hayes live up to their favourites billing with a 1-2-3 finish in the U16 race and in the process easily taking the team title. Cian and Tom were out of age and should be strong contenders in the nationals later in the year.
Sarah Lane ran very strongly to finish 3rd U18 A race won by Newport's Aimee Hayde and Lucy Mulcahy was 5th in the same race.

Then Ted Collins finished 2nd in his U18 race over 6k. Normally a track specialist over 800m it was good to see him run strongly over this distance.

Lastly after the juvenile programme finished our three senior men David Sheahan 1st, Eoin Buckley 3rd and Alan Kelly 4th dominated the Novice mens race. David and Eoin broke away early with Paddy Cummins of Moycarkey and David pulled away at the 4k point of the 6k race to win comfortably.

Visit our Facebook page or Niall Moran Photography Facebook page for photos of the races.

Well done all!