A smaller than usual number of athletes made it to Doncaster for the pre-Zatopec Round 6 AVSL competition. Thankfully the rain stayed away although it looked like the skies were going to open up at any minute all evening. 10 athletes from OXAC took part on the track and in the field (3 Females, 7 Males). The Round 6 programs offered some rarely run distances in Australia: the 60m sprint, 600m and Mile.
We welcomed 3 new OXAC Team members last night: Cam Scarff, Marina Scarff and Laurence Tod all competed in their first round of AVSL after running for OXAC in the Victorian Track Relay Championships. OXAC institution Bob Meek made his long-awaited Summer Session debut in the 600m. Big thanks to Margaret Fitzgerald for filling Club Duties at Murrumbeena, helping out with high jump and staying to the bitter end after the other Club helpers disappeared.
With a smaller than usual squad out on Friday evening competing we finished 8th in Division 4 for Round 6 compiling 3,959 Team points. At the rough mid-point of the season, OXAC sits in 4th place in Division 4 overall, with Ballarat YWC in 3rd, 17 points ahead of us, and Ivanhoe only 3 points behind us in 5th place.
Leading the way as top individual athlete scorer for OXAC was Clara Campillos who scored 824 points. Clara ran both the 60m with a time of 9.30 seconds and the 600m in 2:00.02. Second top scorer for the Team was Laurence Tod. Showing his all-round credentials Laurie competed in 5 events, starting with the 60m sprint (8.89 seconds) before running the Mile about 30 minutes later, finishing first in his heat (5:34.89). Laurie was then off to the Long Jump where he caught his breath as Round 2 of the Long Jump flight got underway. With a no jump on his first attempt Laurie worked on his technique with a few jumps on the adjoining pit before recording his best jump of 4.29m. Not finished it was then off to Shot Put where he achieved 7.55m before finishing with the 600m back on the track finishing with an impressive time of 1:46.42.
Anabelle Colman again ran an impressive race in the top heat of the Women’s Mile. After emulating Jakob Ingebrigtsen and Sifan Hassan settling into the first lap near the back of the field, Anabelle then moved effortlessly through the pack to run down the lead two runners and stick with them. With 250m to go there was a burn up for the line with the Melbourne Uni athlete clearing out leaving Annie and the Richmond athlete to battle it out for second. Never giving up Annabelle pushed all the way to the line finishing 1 second back in 3rd place with a time of 5:12.89.
Marina Scarff ran her debut track AVSL event in heat 3 of the Women’s Mile. Marina lowered her PB to go sub-8 for the first time in 7:51.89.
Alan Colman slightly improved on Laurie’s mile time, running 5:33.88 to be the faster Men’s Miler for the evening (but still eclipsed by his daughter). Also completing the 4 lap distance was Dave Martini running 5:43.29, Alex O’Callaghan 6:17.52, Max Sukdara 6:03.32 and Cam Scarff 7:10.60.
Bob demonstrated true tough man status after falling and injuring his ribs a few weeks ago, fronting up for the 600m event. As a bit of a leap into the unknown on how his injured ribs might react/feel to aerobic air intake and movement, being a doctor Bob gave himself the all clear to have a run going around the 600m distance in 2:22.45. Dave Martini, after a crack at the shot put, fronted up for a third event of the evening in the 600m (1:59.15).
Round 7 will be the last round of AVSL before Christmas.
Reported by Dave Martini