Road Works — Hercules Wimbledon Athletic Club

Sutton Park here we come! The Club's Senior Men head to the West Midlands on Saturday for the National 12-Stage Road Relays, having already made a little bit of Hercules history at the South of England Relays at Milton Keynes on March 27. For the first time ever HW qualified two teams for the Nationals – the only Southern Club to do so.

Now the question is: can the team write another page in the Club's history books by finishing in the top ten for the first time since the glory days of the 1970s?

At Milton Keynes, on a day when the weather turned dramatically from sunshine to wintry cold, the A team finished a fantastic fourth, the best result in these relays since 1972, when the team won for only the second time. The first was in 1969, when the stellar team – which included the much-missed Pete Mulholland, along with the Holt twins, Bob and Dave, and Mike Fuller – beat Belgrave and Mitcham into second and third place respectively in a course record of 3:59:46. Dave Holt took the lead on leg 7 and the team stayed in first, with John Sullivan, who went on to coach our own Dave Clarke, wrapping it up with the fastest HW short-leg ( 15:40). The team went on to the Nationals (then in Leicester) with high hopes. Unfortunately, remembers Mike, the event took place 'on a very warm afternoon in early May and Pete succumbed to heat stroke on leg one. He trailed home in last, nearly five minutes behind the winner, but we still managed to pull through to finish 12th'.

Below: Most of the victorious senior men's team (plus a stack of silverware) after the Southern 12-Stage Road Relay Championships in 1967. Left to right, back row: Mike Beevor, Mike Fuller, John Day (reserve), John Sullivan, Barry (Bas) Collins and Bob Rayman. Front row: Lew Leppan, Pete Mulholland, Bob Holt, Dave Holt and Guy Stogdon (missing are Ron Symons and Graham Bradbury).

Above: Most of the victorious senior men's team (plus a stack of silverware) after the Southern 12-Stage Road Relay Championships in 1967. Left to right, back row: Mike Beevor, Mike Fuller, John Day (reserve), John Sullivan, Barry (Bas) Collins and Bob Rayman. Front row: Lew Leppan, Pete Mulholland, Bob Holt, Dave Holt and Guy Stogdon (missing are Ron Symons and Graham Bradbury).

The 12-stage relay is a rare and fascinating beast: alternate long legs (longer than usual this year at 8.662K) and short legs of 4.987K, fraught with gambles, uncertainties and changing positions as the race unfolds over 4 and a bit hours. Will all 12 men (or 24 in this case) show up on time for their leg, for starters? Then there is the game of who to put on what leg – short or long, later or early – when who knows what formation other teams have gone for. Have your rivals had dropouts due to injury or Covid? Have they front-loaded? Will they fizzle out towards the end or have they saved the strongest for last? News pings around the course, positions get trickier to count as the women's six-stage race enters the fray and runners are lapped. Predictions are constantly revisited. It is always exciting and never over until it's over.

'I absolutely love this event', says Andrew Penney, who was team captain the last time the Club ran at Milton Keynes in 2019, when the A team finished in seventh. Not that he was entirely loving a late-in the-week re-shuffle after Richard McDowell had to withdraw, which entailed Andrew switching from the short final leg to long leg 9 – as well as coach/team manager and reserve, Keith Scofield, being drafted into the B team. But that is what this event is all about: pulling on the vest, putting in a shift and giving it your best shot.

'I always knew my A level in psychology would come in useful,' jokes coach and HW Performance Director, Ben Noad, who shared with Keith the unenviable job of selecting the teams from a hungry, talented squad, and then juggling the running order. 'It's a balancing act', he says. 'You have to know your guys. There are those, like Charlie (Eastaugh) who are at their finest when they have someone to race against; then you have an athlete like Tom Jervis, who runs very close to his best every time, whether or not there are any other runners around him. Or Dan Cliffe, who just says, "tell me what you want me to do and I'll do it". The later legs can be hard work if you find yourself on your own, and you can't always gauge where you are in the scheme of things, but every bit you chip away gives the next runner something to build on.

'Qualifying two teams for the Nationals just underlines yet again the great spirit and ethos of this group', says Ben. 'Everyone stepped up when it mattered and we will shuffle things around again for the Nationals, to keep the balance still, but also reward those who ran legs out of their comfort zone at Milton Keynes for the good of the teams'.

***Above: Charlie Eastaugh in the mix at the start. Photograph by Brian Graves, Marshall Milton Keynes.***

From the off, lead runners Charlie Eastaugh for the A team and Jackson Creegan for the B team, signalled their intent, handing over to their second team runners in 11th and 19th respectively, with only 42 seconds separating them. For Jackson, dancing on the edge of the first team, it was an important marker. 'I wanted to see if I could get a time that could compare with the guys in the A team,' he says. ' I enjoyed it – now its over! When you're out there racing and it's brutal, sometimes you think, 'why am I doing this?' But when you finish, that euphoric feeling you get is why you do it – that and cheering on the lads.'

'There are lots of pockets of supporters and runners warming up and down shouting and cheering around the course', confirmed Jonny Cornish after handing over to Ed Mallett in seventh place on a route he clearly liked. 'There were a few sharp corners, so you had to take care, and it's quite rolling but the hills were fairly gradual, so you could get moving up them, and then there were nice flat bits and downhills – I loved the downhills! You could really speed up again, especially towards the finish'.

Ed Mallett brought the A team up to 6th, a position they maintained until Tom Jervis, whose consistency this season was later noted in AW's report on the event, clocked the fastest time of the leg 11 runners, to steal back another place and bring Bradley Goater close enough to pick up another place early on in his storming final leg.

A Team (4:13:47): Charlie Eastaugh (26:47), Oli Carrington (15:21), Fred Slemeck (27:11), Joe Croft (15:26), Jonny Cornish (26:39), Ed Mallett (15:24), Dan Cliff (26:33), Matt Sharp (16:04), Andrew Penney (27:14), George Mallett (15:12), Tom Jervis (26:46), Bradley Goater (15:03).

B Team (4:41:43): Jackson Creegan (27:29), Andrew Merry (16:37), Joe Toomey (29:21), Ed Charlesworth (18:21), Howell Harrod (28:31), Tom Maloney (16:32), Richard Jones (30:59), Keith Scofield (19:48), Jamie Bannister (30:16), Justin Reid (17:17), Dave Grima (29:31), Simon Wade (16:56).

Full results

Above: Job done – first leg runners Charlie and Jackson kick off their team's campaigns in 11th and 19th place respectively. Right: Dan 'The Man' Cliffe heads out on leg 7 – the fastest HW long-leg run of the day. Photograph by Mark Hookway. And below: Bradley Goater on the glory leg, bringing the A team home in 4th place, and clocking the fastest short-leg run of the squad.

And so to High Noon at Sutton Coldfield on Saturday, where the race has been staged each year since 1970 (except for 1973 – HW's best year – when it moved to Derby).

The first National 12-Stage Championships as we know them were put on by the Amateur Athletics Association in 1967 (though the London to Brighton Relays had taken on the status of an unofficial National Championships since the 1950s) – the same year that Hercules Wimbledon AC was formed from the amalgamation of Hercules AC and Wimbledon AC.

In 1968 the newly formed Club finished 6th in Leicester, the beginning of a rich vein of results which included five top-ten finishes. Mike Fuller, who was a mainstay of those teams, remembers that from 12th in 1969, as mentioned above, the team finished 9th in 1970 – at Sutton Coldfield (in 4:19:54); 11th in 1971; and 8th in 1972 (the year of the Club's second victory at the Southern Relays), in 4:18:36. (Bear in mind times are not necessarily comparable, since they don't take in changes to courses).

In 1973, the team notched up the Club's best ever result at Derby, finishing 4th (in 4:10:39). The team that year was kicked off by Mike Fuller, followed by Steve Newton, Mike Beevor, Dave Beard, Bob Holt, Barry Collins, Dave Holt, John Phelan, Frank Briscoe, David Smallbone and Steve Badgery, with Tim Beagent bringing the team home in 13:29, the fastest HW short leg of the day.

The following year the team came 9th (in 4:10:27), but that was the last top ten finish. Since then the best performance has been in 2018, the last time HW competed in the Nationals, when the team finished in23rd in 4:34.38.

Watch this space...

A massive shout out to Tipton Harriers, who have a phenomenal history at the National 12-Stage (winning 15 times and finishing in the top ten on 46 occasions!) and have compiled an equally phenomenal database of stats on the top 10 teams over the years.