Autumn Open Cross Country Festival

RACE REPORT

Photo by Tomas Greally

This years Autumn Cross Country Festival found a new home in the newly purpose built state of the art cross country course in Abbottstown.

This was the first Cross Country event to be held in Abbottstown, Dublin. The quality of runners certainly graced the occasion and the new facility. The pre registered program list of athletes also added to the already mouth watering event in prospect.

The opening of the high quality facility and prize money up for grabs attracted all the "Big Guns" both nationally and internationally.

This new course is certainly one of Europe's top venues for Cross Country. On site wi fi connections make this a media and spectator friendly venue.

The course itself is fantastic, consisting of all the ingredients that make a great cross country course . The runner experiences all types of terrain from flat golf course like greens, challenging uphills, sandy soft patches through some wooded areas, long straights, along with quick twists and turns. It has it all...

The event started with the Dublin Juveniles testing out the course. This will certainly be a new age for cross country runners. The main event was broken into Male and Female start times. Each age group, junior, senior and masters ran different distances within each race. The women's race started at 2pm with the Men's race at 2.35pm. By the time the men took to the start line, the course was certainly broken in and made it even more challenging for the Athletes..

Race 1 Women's Senior, Masters and Junior (Photo By Tomas Greally)