Tonbridge Athletics Club hosted the Under 13 County Pentathlon Championships where we had two representatives from Thanet Athletics Club. On a miserable day of continuous rain it wasn’t enough to stop both Emily Russell and George Seery winning their silver medals.
Emily Russell, who has just joined the club a matter of 8 weeks ago, was thrown in at the deep end by her coach as she has only had a couple of training sessions on three of the five events!
Her first event was the hurdles where she ran her first personal best of 13.25s to start her day off in 5th place. Her second event was the long jump where she jumped to a second personal best of 3m95. This kept her in 5th place to then go to the shot putt. Considering Emily has never thrown this before it was remarkable that she had the 3rd best throw of the field of athletes to move her up into 4th place. Her 4th event was the high jump where after a wobbly start at 1m09 she then progressed on to finally clear her 4th personal best of the day at 1m33!
So, going into her final event of the 800m Emily was lying in 3rd place. Yet again Emily showed what she was capable of by running a 10 second personal best to run 2m48.60. This gained her enough points to overtake 2nd and finish just short of first place. Her points total of 1983 now ranks Emily 20th in the country.
In the boys pentathlon it was pretty much the same story where George Seery just kept recording personal bests. His first event of the hurdles set him off with his first personal best of the day to register a time of 13.26s, half a second quicker than he has run before, to place him 2nd. His second event was the shot putt where he threw a distance of 6m17, again a huge personal best, to keep him in 2nd place. George then cemented a 3rdconsecutive personal best with a final clearance of 1m35 in his 3rd event, the high jump. This was 10cm higher than George has ever cleared and looked very much capable of higher too. The 4th event, the long jump, kept him in the 2nd place spot with a very near personal best performance of 4m51 before going into the 800m and winning an excited race to record his 4th personal best of the day with a time of 2m29.93.
George finished with a fine points total of 1651 to rank him 6th in the country. Coach Darren Hatton stated that “These two Thanet AC athletes were a shining light on a day where it was difficult to cope with the terrible weather conditions.” He went on to say that “it takes a very good mind set to be able to block out the wind and rain and keep your concentration, and to be able to record that many personal bests is fantastic. They both have a very good future in this sport if they carry on the way they are going.”
Report by Darren Hatton
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