It was always going to be a challenge in 2019 to match our fantastic result of 6th place in 2018 (in the athletics/sporting club category), but we came surprisingly close to matching it in terms of time. As we know, the City2surf, like most races, determines the winning team by adding together the top 3 runners’ times in each team. The team with the lowest cumulative running time wins.
At last year’s City2surf, the top three KRs recorded a cumulative time of 2.39.51 to take out 6th place.
This year, the top three KRs ran a cumulative time of 2.42.01, which is only 2 minutes and 10 seconds slower than last year. That’s pretty good, considering we had a few injuries, and preparation was a little disorganised. Nevertheless, this cumulative time was only good enough to get us 14th place in 2019. That’s still not too bad for a small club like ours!
Since we’re only a couple of minutes slower than 2019, but about 8 places lower in the rankings, it’s noticeable that there’s been an improvement in the team quality for 2019. For instance, the 6th place getters this year, the Newcastle Flyers, recorded a cumulative time of 2.34.33 — more than five minutes faster than our 6th place time of last year.
It’s good to see that the standards are rising. And it’s no surprise when you consider the huge number of runners who seem to get PBs on this course year after year.
In the broader context, even the front of the race are getting much faster. Harry Summers’ extremely close call for taking out Steve Moneghetti’s 1991 race record (40.03), missing it by only about 2 seconds (Harry ran 40.05, gun time), is testament to the improved quality of the runners at the front. Of course, Harry ran a course record, as the City2Surf course changed in 2001; and, importantly, it was changed to make it slower. Harry’s time was also the second fastest race time of all time.
The really positive statistic for the City2Surf this year was not really about the times, but about the size of our team! In 2018, we had a total of 22 entrants and 21 finishers. Compare that with the total of 43 entrants and 38 finishers this year! That’s almost double the entrants!
We also had a full 12 runners run sub-60 this year, which is fantastic, and 25 (65%) run 70 minutes or faster, which speaks to the speed of the group.
There’s lots of other ways we could slice and dice the results. In terms of category placings, the top 3 women did better than the top 3 men, with 2 in the top 100 and all three in the top 200. Age group statistics would also be interesting to analyse, but I’ll save that for others.
See the full placings and times below:
Congratulations to all who ran this year, and let’s see how we do next year on the 50th running of this, one of the world’s biggest fun runs.
Rolling gallery (click to control).
Thanks to Chris Truskett for these actions shots.
