Any runner in search of a half marathon personal best shouldn’t really go to Sheffield to look for it. The annual Sheffield half marathon, starting and finishing at Don Valley Stadium, has a mass start of over 4500 competitors, and unsurprisingly the course includes more hills than the average Goole runner sees in a year’s training. Fortunately however, the average Goole runner laughs in the face of adversity, and so four of the ten Viking Striders who ran Sheffield came away with a supposedly elusive PB.

Richard Bramham did well to knock 35 seconds off his previous best, and Sandra Brooks did even better to dip under two hours for the first time in only her second Half, but the stars of the day had to be Giles Harris and Jo Mouncey.

Giles ran himself to exhaustion for a fantastic time at the London Marathon only two weeks previously, but here he was going under 80 minutes in a half marathon for the first time, finishing in a very respectable 41^st position overall. As for Jo, few would have expected her to continue last year’s dramatic improvement, but another nine minutes chopped off her previous best on this difficult course would suggest there’s plenty more where that came from.

Andy Masterman was the best of the rest, less than a minute outside his PB, but everyone else had the common decency to be well outside theirs. The last thing the Striders want is a bad name for athletic achievement.

Striders’ times:Giles Harris 79.24, Andy Masterman 82.00, Simon Griffin 83.41, Mark Thompson 95.14, Richard Bramham 98.46, Kev Sipling 104.15, Patsy Fenelon 108.49, Richard Anness 114.08, Jo Mouncey 114.58, Sandra Brooks 119.04.

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