Saturday’s competition saw the squad travel out to King’s for the second round of the GPS & CAS Cross Country season. The course at King’s is a true Cross-Country course, featuring sections of grass, road, trail & dirt over a number of undulating hills, tight corners and one huge hill that challenged all runners. In the Juniors we had two runners, Connor Fernandez & Alex Fijan, toe the line in a field of 157 runners. Both runners got off to a strong start and battled through the challenging course with Connor finishing in 75th place (45th GPS), which was a massive improvement of 14 places from last week, and Alex finishing in 116th (71st GPS).
In the Seniors we were missing several runners due to illness and clashes with other sports but our team of Oliver Neate, Daniel Zubani, Matteo Mastro & Tom Ryan ran exceptionally smart and challenging races to finish 6th out of all the GPS & CAS schools.
In an impressive run, Oliver placed 1st in the Opens race after dropping behind the lead runner and being 15m behind him with 200m to go. Despite this Oliver demonstrated the true Joeys fighting spirit to run the leader down and pass him in the final strides of the 8km race. Daniel ran well over the hills to place 30th (21st GPS), Matteo placed 51st (39th GPS) after
battling a stitch throughout the race and Tom placed 79th (64th GPS). A special mention must go to Tom who ran
despite battling illness to allow us to have a team of 4 runners. Next week the squad travels to Sydney Park for
the CIS selection race.
