CompassSport Trophy Final
hosted by Devon OC at Virtuous Lady on 22 October 2017
Last Sunday was a very exciting day. Firstly after the previous day's storm the weather was quite reasonable and certainly not raining which was the most important thing. The first half of the day was just a case of everyone making sure they were at the start at the correct time and having a good run. At this stage overall scores meant very little. However by midday it was starting to get interesting and it was becoming very obvious that there were five teams out of twelve including ourselves after the top 3 spots. For the next hour we ranged between 3rd and 5th bouncing around all over the place but still had several good runners to come but it looked as though the top two places would go to INT and SBOC. To catch either of those we need to lose one of the two low scores that we had counting at that stage. Just after 1pm we had 4 runners come in who all had good positions and we suddenly jumped into 2nd position and pushed SBOC and SARUM down on point scores but SARUM still had one runner to come in who could affect the final scores. We then had a very nervous 15 minutes until the final SARUM runner came in and fortunately for us her score made no difference to any of the top 5 team scores. So we not only achieved our target for the year of being 3rd but also achieved our best ever result in this competition - 2nd!
Well done everyone and particularly those who were not in the top 13 counters but by finishing and getting a result helped to push down the other teams scores (it was that factor that got us the 2nd position as we did not have a single winner but still managed 2nd overall). Also particular praise to all the juniors who ran as they clocked up the majority of our highest scores on the day. Also unknown to us until the presentations Annie Pickering shared the Golden Boot award for the fastest female run in time - 17 seconds - obviously all her altitude training paid off. Our thanks to Becca Ellis - our WIM Team Captain for organising everyone and providing bribes to eat afterwards.
Below is a picture of Becca Ellis, WIM Club Captain, on the podium Also Annie Pickering, joint first lady on the golden boot run-in competition. Well done to everyone for a very successful day - our best results ever for this competition!
Chris Branford
