HPH Chair’s Blog and HOTM for December

Happy New Year, HPH! We hope you all had a restful and fun break, if you got one. I cannot wait to see what 2023 brings for HPH. There’s LOADS to look forward to this year, I can’t wait to see what you all achieve individually, but also what we do as a club.

December’s Harriers of the month are: Honor Baldry and Adam Lomas, both for their contributions to the club and the local Leeds running community. Well done runners, thanks for being great examples to us all.

Honor wins a second month in a row, but this time for a President’s achievement (for club contribution): Honor’s recent Dewsbury 10k plan has helped provide a focus for runners at a time of year when it can be difficult to find motivation to get out and run. Great work Honor, thanks for organising and can’t wait to see how everyone gets on at Dewsbury as a result.

Reusing this awesome photo of Honor, because it’s great!

Adam also wins in this president’s award category for his selfless actions at Temple Newsam PECO to help an injured runner. Adam is a high scorer at PECO and a massive asset to the team and there is a pressure on him to deliver for the team. But naturally, as such a great guy, he just reacted to help out an injured runner without second thought when he could so easily have left it to a Marshall or non scorer. He also then busted a gut to run his way back through the field and get a great position score too! Crikey, iIf more people were like Adam we would live in a much better world.

Adam in his natural mountain habitat.

Our other nominations this month were:

  • Katherine, Kate, Paul and Anne: A fantastic job arranging and hosting the Christmas party – thanks all!
  • Frazer Carr: Not content with a storming marathon time in Valencia, Frazer then went and demolished Telford 10K, comfortably going sub35!!!
  • Danny Clayton: A fantastic performance at the Temple Newsam PECO, including a brief stint as Superman at the water jump
  • Toby Adkins:
    • For compiling our leader stats every week throughout 2022
    • Always got time for everyone and his tracking of sessions is amazing.
  • Anne Akers:
    • Standing in the cold to take brilliant Temple Newsam water jump Peco pictures
    • For continued superb support at races and Peco… And doing her 400th volunteer stint at parkrun! Way to go supporting local runners 😀
  • Richard Knighton:
    • Richard has been going from strength to strength over the past few months with superb parkrun times and amazing PECO performances being a solid anchor at Temple Newsam despite doing an Otley run the day before
    • A fantastic performance at Temple Newsam PECO!
  • George Webster: For achieving what every runner aspires to… Perfect Splits!
  • Steve Rhodes: For yet another ridiculous fell running performance with his HNM Beer Round (catchier name TBC?) – an amazing achievement

A great number of nominations this month; thank you to everyone who took the time to nominate a fellow Harrier. Keep them coming over the winter months! Any HPH of the Month nominations, as well as nominations for other successes for next year’s Awards Do, can be submitted at any time of the month/year at this link.

As always, keep an eye out on the weekly bulletin emails and in the Facebook group for more information about races, discounts, sessions and club activity. If you have any ideas for sessions, any feedback or want to organise a social or event, please get in touch with the committee by emailing us at hello@hydeparkharriers.co.uk or messaging one of us directly on Facebook – hopefully you know who we are! If you don’t, you can find out here.

Our next committee meeting is on Sunday 15th January 2023 – make sure you send us anything for discussion before then, or if you need anything before then, you know where to find us!