London Marathon 2001

A cool, dry day on 22^nd April with only a light wind helped the runners taking part and this was conducive to some spectacular performances from Canterbury Harriers. Martin Skeet and Rob Sargeant ran most of the way together and both finished very comfortably within three hours, Martin just going away from Rob in the last 10K. It was, surprisingly, the first time Martin had broken three hours in the event. Jacob Howe had a quite brilliant debut, completing the course at exactly 7 minute mile pace. Dianne August had an excellent run too in setting a new PB and overcoming both the disappointment of last year when she was unable to run and also injury problems this year. Dianne, however, was unlucky since in some years her time would win the club's Female Marathon prize, but like Jenny Michaelson (3:48:34 in New York last November) and Kate Prescott (3:28:30 in Paris) she has to give way to our Female Champion, Carol Reid, who ran a superb net time of 3:24:45. Of the other runners, Mick Holmans was suffering from a bug and so his time did not reflect his level of fitness or the amount of hard training he had put in. The master of consistency, Joe Epsom, managed yet another time at around the 3:50 mark and Pete Greenwood continued his membership of the exclusive "Ever Presents" club of those that have now done all 21 London Marathons.

There was something else, of course, that's missing from the above report: Roy Palmer's extraordinary run that meant he came in the top 200 of the race (and let's not forget that there were over 30,000 finishers), and set a new club record, beating Greg Callaghan's previous mark by half a minute. Roy's time equated to averaging 6:10 every mile and was tribute to his efforts in preparing for the event.

In the table below, all the times given are "gross" ones (i.e. from when the gun went) since the London Marathon website (www.london-marathon.co.uk) does not record the time taken to cross the start line, unlike Paris (www.parismarathon.com) or New York (http://www.nyrrc.org/nyrrc/marathon/home.html), the latter also giving splits in "real-time" so that you could follow the progress of runners.