Athletics: Silver service for Sarah

Feb 26 2009 by Eric MacKinnon, West Lothian Courier

LOTHIAN Running Club’s Sarah Inglis’ season is going from strength to strength and the teenager added a silver medal to her ever-increasing haul of honours last weekend.

The club was well represented at the Scottish National Cross Country Championships at Callendar Park, Falkirk on Saturday with an impressive 25 athletes from the club competing.

But star of the show was Sarah as she took the silver in the women’s under-20 category. Club-mate Edel Mooney finished just outside the medals in fifth place in the senior women’s race.

The season so far for Sarah has been outstanding. She took the East-District title in December and on Saturday made a brave bid to add the Scottish title to her already impressive list of honours.

This includes bronze medals she has won in the under-17 category at the championships the previous two years.

Conditions on the day were ideal for running and with around 1500 metres of the undulating and testing course remaining Sarah took over pole position from long time leader Nicola Hood [VP Glasgow] and the possibility of taking the title looked on.

However with only 50 metres to run the Glasgow athlete surged back into the lead and sprinted on to break the finishing tape in 16m 07 seconds with Sarah an excellent second in 16m 14s.

Despite only picking up silver Sarah was understandably thrilled with her run and is looking forward to what is left of the cross-country season.

There was an equally impressive performance in the senior women’s race by Mooney who covered the 8km course in 29m 28s to place a marvellous fifth behind champion Freya Murray, Edinburgh AC.

This was an improvement of two places from her 2008 run. The next two Lothian runners across the line were Lynne Murray and Marie Storrie in 56th and 82nd places respectively which saw the Lothian ladies finish 10th in the team event.

A total of 413 runners completed the 12km of the senior men’s race with the first runners back for the Lothian club being Ross Milne in 32nd place, Brian Turner 68th and Ben Hartman 86th.

The Lothian men's team finished in 13th place.

In the men’s under-20 race Robert Inglis was the only representative from the club and he finished 20th of the 49 finishers.

And in the under-17 category, Lana Turnbull came home in 26th place in the girls’ race while in the male equivalent Alistair Robertson was 32nd and Craig McDowell 40th.

Lauren Arbuckle contested the girls’ under-13 race and crossed the line 61st out of the 112 finishers.