Some of you will know Will Haw. He’s our 800m specialist who headed out to Michigan last years on an athletics scholarship at Northwood University, competing in one of the toughest NCAA Division II conferences in the country. He’s just wrapped up his first ever indoor track season, and has provided us with this update.
His headline number for the 800 is 1:52. He ran it five times indoors this season and Will says he’s happy with it. Though Will being Will, he’d have liked to go a bit faster.
Some athletes have a breakthrough season. Katie Adams is having a breakthrough two months.
Since the start of February 2026, the University of York Social Work student and Vale of York athlete has lined up for three 3000 metre races and raced faster in every single one.
During March, as part of my 2026 miles in 2026 project, I took in two races. Two very hilly races, and important milestones on my road to the London Marathon on 26 April.
The first was the Liversedge Half Marathon on 1 March, which also happened to be my 59th birthday. A birthday treat of 13.1 miles felt about right. The race starts in Roberttown, just up the road from Spen Valley Stadium, Princess Mary Stadium, where we compete for West Yorkshire Track and Field. It was the 30th running of the Liversedge Half and my first time doing it in those 30 years. It had a good community feel about it. Registration was in a village hall, the community had come together to host it, and although the roads weren’t fully closed, there was a closed start before opening out onto a mixture of road, pavement, and the odd grass verge. Challenging terrain, and challenging topology too.
Vale of York members helped the University of York Athletics and Running Club with a volunteer takeover of York parkrun on 14 March. We filled a number of volunteer roles on the day including pacing.
Pacing is absolutely the key to a good parkrun time. Go out too fast and you’re doomed to underperform. Meter out your resources effectively from the start to the finish line and you’ll stand the best chance of achieving your time goal and fulfilling your running potential.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) sometimes gets a bad press, but we’ve found it extremely useful for a variety of tasks at our athletics club, Vale of York Athletic Community. Here’s a brief overview of how we’re using it to help plan our FMC (Funetics Multi Challenge) competition on 27 June at the University of York.
Scheduling an event timetable for an athletics meeting can undoubtedly be a complex task. It’s even more challenging if you’ve never done it before, as we hadn’t.
England Athletics provide a helpful club guide including an example timetable for anyone wanting to put on an FMC meet, which covers event sequencing, group sizes and timings. But our specific challenge was adapting EA’s morning timetable to an afternoon slot, with our own particular athlete numbers and group structure.
We fed the EA guidance document and our requirements into Claude, and it produced the Master Timetable for our meet you can see below. A handful of revisions later — mainly adjusting buffer times and the long jump duration whilst compensating for some inconsistencies in the original document — we had a print-ready schedule in a total of fifteen minutes.
For the last two years, Vale of York has made dressing up for the PECO XC Relays a tradition. Inspired by our University of York members, who have their “challenge week” at the same time as the relays, raising money for their University Athletics and Running Club, fancy dress is just too much fun to miss.
And 2026 proved to be the best for fancy dress participation we’ve ever had.
Standout costume this year had to be Bananaman, A.K.A James Leadbeater, father of Ewan and Isabella. His full length costume as the 1980s TV cartoon superhero, was accompanied by three giant size bananas (Sarah, Beverley and Steve) for good measure.
At Vale of York, we like to encourage all our young athletes to perform at the best of their abilities. We’ve seen league wins, national qualifiers, personal bests and solid commitment from children across all age groups. But medals and times are not the measure that matters most to us.
Athletics is a long-term development sport.
Children develop at different rates, and while some mature early and look physically dominant at twelve or thirteen, others develop later and quietly catch up. Some balance athletics with football, hockey or other sports. Others just enjoy turning up once a week to work out and be with friends. All of those pathways are valid.
Our responsibility as Vale of York Athletic Community is to protect long-term development, wellbeing and enjoyment so that young people stay in sport for a lifetime.
Vale of York athlete Henry Henderson was awarded his junior parkrun 100 wristband this Sunday by the volunteers at Brayton Academy Junior parkrun.
Now nine years old, Henry has been running junior parkrun since 2021, starting as a four-year-old as soon as Covid restrictions were lifted. Since then, he has turned up regularly on a Sunday morning with his mum, dad and younger brother to complete the 2km run.
His consistency over five years at his age is impressive in itself.
It has been another strong PECO cross country season for Vale of York Athletic Community, and at the forefront for the juniors has been Archie Hadfield.
Archie finished 1st U13 boy in the league, with a string of consistent podium performances that never saw him finish outside the top three across all five races in the series.
His commitment to completing all five races mattered. Our junior squad of forty athletes were all chasing the “merch that money can’t buy” for completing every race in the series. Not everyone can win their age category, but everyone can do their very best to take part and earn their own reward as a result.
I was back to 40+ miles last week of mostly easy running. It felt good to see the mileage return to something that would see me back on course for 2026 miles in 2026, although I’m not entirely back on track yet and will not be chasing any bigger totals just yet.