Fourteen of the group made the trip to the Lee Valley Indoor Centre on Sunday to participate in the Metaswitch Indoor Open. There was a varying degree of success, but the real key was that everyone who attended took this opportunity to train in a competition environment. This meeting was for us an out and out training session. In that regard it was very successful and hopefully everyone will have learnt something.

Rhiannon Jones and Rachel Giannini were racing for the first time over the U17W hurdle spacing, so it was very pleasing to see both of them run both of their rounds with no worries about that new spacing. A real bonus was that Rhiannon won both rounds in impressive style and that of course they both got pbs.

In the U17W 200m, Rachel Dickens placed second (25.84) in her race pipping last year English Schools Junior 100m winner in the process. Amara Lalemi-Jacobs (27.14) was in the same race and she produced a fairly solid effort. Georgina Middleton (26.56) won the next race very impressively, Lauren Stevens (28.10) also in the same race ran with a bit left in the tank. Charlotte Colegate (27.67) placed 2nd in the next race which was an altogether very close finish between the top 3. The time Charlotte achieved was actually a 200m pb for her.

James Allen also raced the 200m in the U17M edition where he produced a 25.59 result.

The U17M 400m produced some interesting results, notably Jon Pettet in 53.03 where he undoubtedly could have run faster, and Josh Oyedele (56.76) who learnt that you cannot jog away from the start and expect to feature in the race.

Chelsea Crouser ran the U20W 400m where she produced a fairly decent time of 61.73, Rachel Robinson (66.59) did the U17W equivalent where it was probably 100m too long. Fortunately U17W normally run 300m not 400m.

In the field, Lauren Stevens had a fairly solid series of jumps in the Long Jump with a best of 4.88m. The interesting thing here was that virtually every jump was behind the board, so she was actually jumping in the 5.20m area all the time, but unfortunately if you don't hit the board they are never measured at that. James Allen produced 5.49m in the U17M equivalent.

And last but not least, Mark Longhurst and Tom Jenkins took part in the U20M Triple Jump. Let's just say that it was as well this was a training exercise as they would both admit they had significant problems on the runway.