GB athletes gained medal momentum on Tuesday and Wednesday at the World Masters Champs with success in the 10km and on the track as Virginia Mitchell also broke a world mark at 400m
A day after his nation were remarkably beating Spain at football, Alastair Walker pulled off a more predictable Scottish victory as he won the world M65 title by over two minutes in a stunning world 10km record of 34:18.
Competitors such as Jaap Stijlarrt and Thomas Payne ran the sort of times normally good enough to win gold in this age group but were around half a mile back. Walker easily beat the M60 winner and even two of the three M55 medallists as well as all the women category winners.
These World Masters Indoor Championships are being held in Toruń, Poland, from March 26 to April 1 and include road and cross-country running competitions.
The other British male 10km winner was M75 Norman Baillie, who won gold by two minutes in 46:02 with Alan Appleby third, while Phil Brennan was second in the M80 category. Baillie had won the cross-country gold two days earlier.
The only UK women’s winner was Sue McDonald, who, after a fourth in the 3000m and third in the cross-country, continued her progression as she started fast and held on to win in 38:53 from a below par European champion Clare Elms who took silver.
Ukraine’s Lyudmila Pushkina, who had done her training through the war, was a clear third in 42:26.
Pick of the women’s winners, though, was Italian W50 Carla Primo who finished close to the overall women’s winner Andreaia Santos of Portugal with 35:36.
W50 winner Carla Primo
While the other men’s performance of note came from 2:07:36 Kenyan marathoner Keneth Mburu. He won the overall men’s 10km race in 29:28 and he was followed in by fellow M45 Javier Diaz Carretero (31:26) almost two minutes adrift.
Mburu, who turns 50 in September and ran 2:13:39 at altitude in Nairobi last year, is a multiple winner of the Toronto and Gold Coast marathons and also won Milan and Prague and ran in the 2018 Commonwealth Games.
Keneth Mburu winning the overall men’s race
On the indoor track, Britain’s best moments on days three and four of the week-long championships came at 400m.
There was a dramatic W65 400m final. Caroline Powell was up against world record-holder and fellow masters sprint great Karla Del Grande, who had turned 70 after the championships had started and had set a W70 world record of 71.34 in her heat.
Del Grande was fractionally ahead at 200m in…
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