Report by Graham Dudfield.

My normal advice to anyone is don’t start too fast, work into the race, but at the Secondary School champs, the advice is opposite; get out fast or else you’ll be stuck behind 50 or 60 runners at the first corner, 100meters from the start line.

The squad has been working on fast starts and it looked like this had worked, to a point. Tasman Reid led the 1st 100m (maybe not quite start that fast Taz!) but Max nearly gave us all a heart attack when he tripped on one of the marker poles at the starting gates. Jack was right behind him and had to wait until Max recovered his stride, before he could get going so by that time Max was about 40th and Jack 60th in the 1st 50M.

They both burnt a lot of energy getting back up to the lead bunch but while Max managed to settle in, Jack had more work to do, which was too hard to recover from.

Max ran an incredible race for 2nd place and 1st U17 and Jack went well for 12th place and 4th U17.

Great effort from Tas who settled in and worked his way through to 16th, a huge improvement from his 60th place at Whangarei, 2:06 faster.

Jacob Liu found the muddy footing hard and couldn’t get into stride but still finished in the top half of the field.

Daniel had a great run to finish just out of the medals in 4th place.

Good learning experience from Jahan Moore and Crystal Burgess in their 1st Cross Country Nationals, both ran well.

Anna Phillips and Charlotte Hoy had a good runs in the Junior Girls for  5th and 11th Places.