European Duathlon Championships and Windsor Dorney

What an amazing 2 weeks it has been for Serena O’Connor. Fresh off a brilliant cross country season with podium finishes at national level, 2 weeks ago Serena lined up against the best junior duathletes in the country in the National Championships at Windsor. Racing for TriPurbeck, Serena finished the first run in the lead pack and comfortably held on to the bike group before storming through with the fastest second run to win and become TriPurbeck’s first elite national champion. If that’s not exciting enough, she was immediately selected to race elite for the GB team in the European Champioships in Kalkar, Germany on Saturday. Again finishing the run in the lead pack, this time Serena wasn’t quite able to hang on to the strongest bikers but finished an amazing 7th place in her very first race at this level. We suspect this will be the first of many and we’ll give you some more details and photos when we have them.

Meanwhile, Fran, Annie, Claude and David Kelly were all racing at the Dorney lake F3 duathlon also on Saturday. Annie in the supersprint and the rest in the standard. Good performances all round but the stand out for me (yes I am biased) was Annie finishing 5th overall female and collecting her first winners trophy in the 16-19 category (any misrepresentation of Annie’s age is solely the responsibility of her mother )