Another good weekend of competition to report on . It started with the Annual Art O’ Neill challenge which began at Dublin Castle on Friday night with a finish down in Glenamure , Co Wicklow on Saturday morning. Brian Kitson ran his fastest time over the distance with a 9th place finish in 6 hours and 5 minutes. Others to complete the distance from the group were Aidan Blake (46th – 7 hours 48 minutes) and Rob Priestman close behind ( 49th – 7 hours 50 minutes). On Saturday morning over in Scotland Laura Shaughnessy won the women’s race in the Great Stirling Castle Run and Niamh Devlin finished 3rd. In the men’s equivalent , Brian O’ Mhurchu also finished 3rd and Brian Byrne was 6th. Also on Saturday was the first BHAA cross country of the year with the BOI cross country in Tymon Park. We had a smaller than usual number competing. In the women’s race Florrie Curley was 3rd overall and won the O/45 category with Diane McNevin finishing 5th O/40.In the men’s race Derek Taylor was our first finisher in 12th place (2nd O/40) with Alasdair Brown right behind in 13th and Eoin Kealy in 25th. Today was the Leinster Masters cross country in Gowran , Kilkenny and our relatively small number who competed came back with a bagful of medals. Tom Lupton himself won 3 medals with an indvidual silver medal for 2nd place overall (O/35) and silver and bronze in the team club and county competitions. Our next finisher Michael McMahon just missed out on an individual medal by finishing in 4th place but help Dublin to county gold. Next up was Paul Fleming who followed up his Dublin win with another win in the O/40 category. Also in the O/40 category Phil Kilgannon was 7th overall but also took home gold by scoring on the winning club team.Others competing were Ciaran Alyward who finished 20th (O/35) and Michael Gygax (7th / O55).Also today was the start of the 2019 Imra season with the first race being the Hellfire race. Our first finisher was john MaCauley in 20th place followed by Geoff Duff 21st, Caoimhin MacMaolain 28th and Ray Magourty 56th.
