Marco lands Euro 24-Hour team silver

Monday 24th October 2016

GB men on the podium in France as they take silver at the Euro 24-Hour Champs

Scottish athlete Marco Consani savoured a fine eighth place at the Euro 24-Hour Champs – and landed a team silver medal with GB and NI.

The Garscube Harriers athlete ran more than 250K in the 24-Hour period in Albi, France, as team-mate Dan Lawson won the IAU European title.

Lawson ran 261.843K to finish almost 3K ahead of Czech runner Ondrej Velicka, with France’s Stephane Ruel in third (257.296K).

In improving his PB by almost 20K, Lawson moved up to fourth on the GB all time 24-Hour listings.It is the first time a British male athlete has won this title. Eleanor Robinson, who was in Albi as part of the support crew, was a British female winner in the 1990s.

With the combined distances of the first three runners in each team, counting to the overall team total, he was backed up by Marco Consani in 8th (250.283K) and James Elson in 22nd (231.163K) to give a combined team total of 743.269K

The men’s French team, inspired by home advantage took the team title with 763.291K.

The Women’s race saw a very impressive run by the Swedish runner Maria Janson, the defending European champion. She posted a distance of 250.647K,to retain her title, and set a new European record best performance.

This bettered the previous marks of GB’s Lizzy Hawker 247.076K (road) and Hungary’s Edit Berces 250.106K (track). Only the Japanese runner Mami Kudo with 255.303K has run further in a 24-Hour event. Poland won the Women’s title with Sweden second and France third.

There were mixed performances for the GB woman, all of whom had challenging races, but stuck to the task nonetheless.

Ally Young, winning her first GB vest did very well to finish 18th with 215.253K. Izzy Wykes finished with 190.236K, Debbbie Consani 178.069K and Sharon Law 92.871K. This gave the British team 10th place in the team contest out of 17 countries who finished teams.

Full results can be seen at http://www.iau-ultramarathon.org or http://www.breizhchrono.com

With thanks to Adrian Stott