Remember to check the
Ambleside AC website for updatesand if you are on Facebook you can find the
Ambleside AC
page where we post pictures and news from the Juniors
more regularly. If you ‘like’ the page you can add your
own comments and pictures too.
Our numbers keep
growing and now that the club vests have arrived we have
almost run out of them straight away!
We have been lucky
with weather on our Thursday night trainings for most of
the summer and enjoyed many evenings training on the
hill to Todd Crag and lapping Lily Tarn.
We have had such
great support from other senior club members and from
regular parent helpers so we have coped well with high
numbers – 24 juniors on one session – and we are
regularly getting 15 or more to training nights. Meeting
at the new venue is working well and we are making the
most of the light summer nights. As someone who loves
racing - even if I’m never going to get near the front
of the field -I’m glad that we’ve been able to get more
Ambleside Juniors to events this summer to give them
more experience of the pace and thrill of a fell race.
We had an amusing day at Ingleton Sports where just
Tessa and Alice ran for the girls and Alexander for the
boys. A strange mix-up with start times saw all three of
our runners rapidly dropping ice-creams and cake when we
heard that the runners had lined up, a mad sprint to
halt the starter and they hurriedly threw on their gear.
Alice said, "It’s all right, I’ll just run in my wellies"
but thankfully she did have time to put on her running
shoes! A slightly less chaotic start at Ambleside Sports
saw five of our runners competing, with some of the
younger members frustrated that they were not old enough
to enter - sorry to Daniel, Harry & James – that was
frustrating for you.
Our final event at
Rusland Show saw
ELEVEN
Ambleside Junior members line up for the race: a
fast run-out over a series of fields, then a short sharp
hill, and return.
Luke and Ben led the
field and should have taken the first two places if they
had not taken a wrong turning into the show field (!)
with Alice almost on their heels easily winning the
first girl prize.
All the team ran well
and I can see that the training has made a huge
difference in everyone’s ability to keep moving up the
hills and to race the descents. Very proud as always,
especially when the announcer mentioned the numbers of
Ambleside vests and wondered whether there could have
been anyone left in Ambleside today!
Rusland Sports – start of the U12 fell race
So the final
Championship tables show wins for Alice Boston (U12
girls), Alexander Knowles (U12 boys), Tessa Knowles (U9
girls) and Alfie Savage (U9 boys) and we will have a
presentation at one of our training nights in September,
when we are all back from holidays and have a good
turnout.
Of course some
members have joined the club part-way through and have
not been able to enter the maximum four of these six
races on the list, so the greatest advantage in this
summer Club Championship goes to those who joined early
and turned out regularly. I will circulate the full
tables as soon as the confirmed results come out from
Rusland Sports, to make sure I have allocated the points
correctly to the other boys in the U9 category (as I
wasn’t standing at the finish and can’t be sure I got
this right).
Parents, please make
a note of the Kendal Winter League series, a series of
weekly Sunday events from early January through to late
March. Full details will be on the Helm Hill website –
www.helmhillrunners.co.uk/winter_league. The list of
races doesn’t generally change from year to year, so you
can see where these are held from last year’s details.
This series is very
well attended by juniors from other fell running clubs,
particularly Helm Hill and Wharfedale, and will provide
some excellent racing experience for our team. I intend
to set an Ambleside Juniors winter Club Championship
based on this series, taking the results from the Winter
League results tables as they emerge. Kate and I are
thinking about ways to help with shared transport to
some of these, possibly using a community minibus, as
some of the venues are quite a distance and I realise
that some families have other things to do on Sundays
than stand and wait in wet, windy fields.
Thanks for taking
part and supporting the Ambleside Juniors and we look
forward to a successful autumn and winter.
