Masters Season Review
Our very own World Champion Adrian Essex has submitted the following review of the Masters Season so far this year. If you are over 35 and fancy giving Masters Athletics ago speak to Adrian or any of the Coaches. “It has been a bizarre season. 2020 was an almost complete write off as the result of swingeing government restriction, and no events are recorded for Heathside in January, February and March of 2021. A simple count of the months in the Heathside performances https://www.thepowerof10.info/rankings/rankinglists.aspx?clubid=826&agegroups=ALL&year=2021&firstclaimonly=n&limits=n shows a heavy preponderance of activity in July and September.
The Southern Athletics League took place with a complex mathematical scoring system, which most participants still did not understand by the end of the season, if indeed they even knew about it.
The Middlesex Vets League took place with no scoring at all.
Almost everything was postponed, if not actually cancelled.
But seasoned Heathsiders seem to have weathered this storm tolerably well, and altogether had quite a good season. Many of them will already have had highly developed coping skills, adult life can do that for you. And there has been support throughout from coaches. Numbers at the track soon got back up to pre-lockdown levels when rules allowed and I suspect the same was true at other venues. And possibly, the very limited number of opportunities for competition have concentrated efforts to higher quality effect. It is true too, that there may have been fewer competitors.
The specialist Vets Sprints Training group based at the track continues to gather new members.
Still and all, the images above, crude infographics, are of grids, filled in with top 30 UK ranking efforts by Heathside Vets (age 35 and over). The columns are events, split up into
Running
Running over barriers
Jumping
Throwing
Running on roads (though the London Marathon is excluded)
and the rows are the 5 year age groups, from 35 up to 70, men and women together.
There will of course be errors and omissions, but I hope not so many as to take away from the general idea, which is that the less white space there is on the grids, the better the club’s Vets have done. They have done quite well.”
