Five Sussex athletes are on England indoor athletic duty this weekend with Elise Lovell (Hastings) heading to Prague for a pentathlon match while Eastbourne’s Sebastian Rodger will be off to Vienna to compete Indoors over 400 metres.
Also in action at the Vienna meeting are Brighton Phoenix 800 metre runners Spencer Thomas and Sophie Mansfield.
And there is more as Brighton & Hove’s Ian Crowe-Wright and Finley Bigg (Phoenix) both debut for the England team Crowe Wright over 1500 metres and Bigg over 800 metres in Bratislava.
Southern Championships
Many Sussex athletes will be making the journey to Parliament Hill Fields on Hampstead Heath on Saturday for the South of England Cross-county championships but just who will go?
The Southern is the first step to National and Inter-county championships for senior athletes over the next seven weeks but for the leading Schools athletes they will also be involved in an Area Inter-county match and the All England Schools championships at the end of the season in Mid-march.
Parliament Hill, despite a mild, dry winter is a still a hilly tough course even though the dry winter will not produce the normal deep mud that is the norm at this time of the year, it is the most testing course they are likely to face this winter.
In recent years Sussex athletes have won medals in the senior 9-mile race and County Champion Jon Pepper (Brighton Phoenix), who in recent years has got amongst the medals will be heading the Sussex runners and hoping to again get amongst the gongs.
Other than possible success in the senior race we would need to look at the other end of the five age groups to Bethany Cook (Bodyworks) who could even run away with the U13 crown but she has five tough races between now and mid-March and may well to give this weekend a miss.
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