Colchester Harriers Super-vet Paul Mingay has run his way into the record books with an outstanding performance in the Valencia Marathon.  The 62 year old Feering based athlete recorded a remarkable time of 2:45:14 and in doing so broke the UK record for the fastest ever marathon ran by an over 60 athlete, beating the previous record set in 1991 by over a minute.  Mingay was also over 4 minutes ahead of his nearest rival on the day in what was a top quality international field.  Harrier’s international race walker Daniel King also ran in the event, finishing his first competitive marathon run in 3:31:02.

Fellow vet Colin Ridley was also enjoying success overseas – winning his age group in the International Running Challenge in Lanzarote.  Completing 4 races in 4 days, finishing with a gruelling off-road half-marathon, Ridley ended up more than 4 minutes ahead of his nearest rival.  Simon Ford finished 7^th in the tough V40 category and Andrew Conway also completed 3 of the 4 races.

Back in the UK the cross country season is well under-way with the Essex Junior and Vets Championships taking place on Saturday at Writtle.  The event saw Harriers maintain their dominance in the V50 men category, with Allen Smalls, Colin Ridley, Pete West and Russell Goodridge combining to take the gold team medal, with Goodridge’s medal his first in 32 years of representing the club.  Smalls also won the individual V50 gold with Ridley taking gold in the V55 age group just ahead of West who went home with silver.  The women’s V40 team also had a good day with top 30 finishes for Alexandra Hennessey (13th), Annette Oakman (20th), Kate Sandercock (26th) and Kate Gibson (27th) securing them a bronze medal in the team competition.  Despite being depleted by injury the Men’s V40 team of Richard Heath (7th), Doug McGilvray (18th), James Wright (19th) and Paul Rodgers (25th) only just missed out on a medal with Heath at least having the consolation of bagging a bronze in the individual Men’s 45 event.  There were other notable individual performances from Lyla Belshaw who took the silver in the under-13 girls event, Mel Dowell who won silver in the women’s V55 and Fran Norris with bronze in the women’s V60.  All of the above were well supported by a whole host of other good performances on a day which was awash with green as nearly 40 Harriers competed across all the events.

There were also a host of good performances at the weekend’s parkrun events.  Dan Widdowson ran 19:02 to finish first at Highwoods, with Jerry Walder (20:36), Dan Foster (21:26) and Sean Duffet (21:45) also making the top 6.  Across town Danny Millward ran 17:42 to finish second at Colchester’s Castle Park with Jason Gunn third in 18:14, Cameron Humphries fifth in 18:42, Ian Jeffries eighth in 19:14 and Ella Jeffries second lady in 21:41.  Elsewhere in the county Heidi Steele was  first lady at Maldon in 19:33, a feat Milly Presland emulated at Chelmsford with her run of 20:09, whilst Chris Sellens ran 21:21 to be first across the line at Mersea Island.  Other top 10 performances were recorded by Gavin Scanlon (17:52 at Norwich), Paul Dobson (19:22 at Maldon), Richard Flutter (20:45) at Dolgellau and Jon Fryer (21:57 at Mersea Island).