Race Date: Saturday 5th November 2022

In August my Lancashire Walking Club racewalk clubmate Adrian completed a 100 mile racewalk in under 24 hours, becoming a Centurion. A great achievement. Adrian usually wins all of our races when he competes. I didn’t compete in our club race in October but I noticed that he only won by a few seconds. 100 mile races take some time to recover from.

Therefore for the club AGM 5km race I had a plan, follow Adrian from the start and see if I could hang on? After volunteering at Millhouses parkrun I went to Simister in north Manchester for the 5km.

I did 1.2km racewalk to warm up with some fast walking, conditions were fairly cold and windy, at least the rain held off.

13 lined up, I followed Adrian from the start, soon walking fast and working hard as we headed down the hill to Heaton Park. There were two other fast walkers taking part, Martin from Redcar and another Tony. My namesake is a Lancastrian resident on the Greek island of Crete, he was making a visit home. Tony and Martin came past at 500m so I followed them. Working very hard but I hung on the best I could, halfway in 14.50, Adrian had dropped back!

The other Tony pulled away from 3km, I kept going and slowly reeled him up the hill in the last mile. 500m to go I caught and passed him and then managed to raise a sprint from 400m out, I won the race in 29.19!

Very tired on finishing, didn’t expect to go that fast. I haven’t broken 30 mins for 5km for a few years!

800m very slow to recover before we all went indoors for the AGM.

Photo shows me approaching the finish line.

https://lancswalkingclub.com/2022/11/11/tony-bell-sprints-to-victory-in-the-agm-5km/