That was the cross country season

The Inter Counties Cross Country Championships have been held in Nottingham for the past 11 years and I think Sky have covered them for most , if not all, of those years.

Certainly it has become a tradition for me (and lots of other Manx runners) to be calling out "come on Keith" at this time of year in the hope that Sky have developed some new interactive service which allows viewers to communicate with the competitors!

I remember spending hours in previous years trying to master the act of copying recorded TV onto my PC and then learning how to take a still photo from the video. This year I took a step further with a production of a video of the recorded highlights. Although the editing is not of professional standard, I think it gives you a good feeling for what was a terrific race and a great performance by Keith Gerrard. I'm going to take if offline in the next couple of days.

I also saw Kevin Loundes when I watched it live but missed him when I did the editing. I also saw David Griffiths with video camera in hand at the side of the track.

The theme of this post was to be that I wasn't going to do any further coverage of the cross country season on the site but I am already relenting and thinking I will have a look for Kevin and David on the film tonight to get a still photo extracted.

I read Chris Quine's blog about team selection with interest last week and his post race analysis will no doubt be well worth reading.

For the first time for at least four years I managed to run in all the Manx Gas races and the Lancashire Cross Country so I didn't really add to my photo collection this year. I returned to cross country on a regular basis in about 1991 (having run the odd race at school and a few when I was concentrating on race walking up to 1983) and I would claim to have run as many events as anyone during that period. In most years I ran all the races because I was not taking part in UK events.

I've found this season hard but have thoroughly enjoyed the competition in whatever part of the race I have found myself. On the face of it I have gone backwards since the opening race (also at Nobles Park) but, whereas at that time I had only run about 20 miles in 6 weeks through injury, this time I had run a very hard 20 miles on Friday afternoon alone.

One of the really pleasing aspects of the race yesterday was to see several new faces taking part.

It was disappointing to see relatively small fields though I go along with the views expressed in some other quarters that the race is an anticlimax after the excitement of the championships (and the double points).

It takes a lot of man hours to organise each event and I think the standard of organisation has got better than ever - I noticed more marshals than ever before. A particular thanks to Andy Fox who organised yesterday's event on behalf of Manx Harriers. All helpers deserve credit though on such a cold day.

Thanks to Gail Griffiths who emailed to suggest that she videoed some of the races, although apologies to her that I did not fully charge the battery. I must have given her at least 10 seconds of training with the camera and so there were a few bits I couldn't use. By the time I got through the second edit (to reduce the length to the same length of the music) I thought it came out fairly well though. Some runners get more coverage than others although that's not a bad thing - such matters average out.

I'm looking forward to seeing the results when David Griffiths gets back. Thanks to him and all the team who worked so hard to make the event a success. It can always be improved and I'm sure they will welcome all ideas.

That said, its pretty hard to get a traditional, hilly, muddy, wet and windy country setting in a park with a firm fast course in the sun. In other words, you'll never please everyone, me included.



I'm looking forward