On the 19th & 20th July Gail Duckworth spent a couple of days on the track. This is not unusual in itself, but the fact she was in Nyiregyhaza, Hungary, representing Great Britain and Northern Ireland at the European Masters Athletics Chapionships made it somewhat different to trotting around Leighton Buzzard with the rest of us!

Gail was entered for two events in the F55 age group with her speciality of the 5000m being preceded by the 1500m on Saturday afternoon. Unfortunately I cannot tell you what each race was like exactly but the results probably say enough. In the 1500m, Gail was one of four Brits in the final and was not expecting too much, but the fact that the top three were within 3 seconds and 13 ahead of the rest of the field suggests a great race. As it turned out, Gail was pipped to the line by a German, but she did her own pipping too as she sneaked ahead of fellow Brit, Joan Howe to take the silver medal in 5:22.

In her favoured event of 5000m, once more she lined up alongside three other Brits, but none of them had run the 1500m on the previous day and so had fresh legs to help them around the 12.5 laps! However, there was clearly a gap in class as Gail and Sandra Branney (also from GB&I) ran away from the field straight away. In the end Sandra just a had a little to much for Gail and won by 9 seconds but Gail was over a minute ahead of third. Her time of 20:04 is not her best, but with consecutive days of racing and travelling and two silver medals to take home, she was extremely pleased.

One thing to note, when looking through the results is that there was a F75 & an M85 race so we could be reporting on these for a few years yet! There’s a link to the results on the results page.