Some of you will know Will Haw. He’s our 800m specialist who headed out to Michigan last year 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.
Boom! I started March with a very hilly half marathon around the hills of Cleckhuddersfax. I was really apprehensive about the Liversedge Half on 1 March, despite running the Brass Monkey in January on very little training plus a few 10 milers. I guess the pressure to perform is now mounting. There was no expectation back in January. My legs were tired and anyone who knows me knows how I love a hill, but it turns out that I needn’t have worried. I finished in 2:16 — only one minute slower than a very flat Brass Monkey course.
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.
A trio of junior athletes represented Vale of York at the South Yorkshire Athletics Indoor Series in Sheffield on Sunday (22 March).
The series tested athletes across a range of disciplines including sprinting, jumping, endurance and throwing events.
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.
So, after a full month of ‘real’ training in January, I was looking forward to building on those foundations in the short month of February. As my fitness has increased, it’s been fun to go out and choose my pace. I do follow the plan like it’s my new religion, however, there is some flexibility between the top end and low end of the training paces so when I’m feeling fresh, I’m naturally running easier and faster. A total of 113.6 miles done in February and my parkrun time has dropped to mid 27 minutes.
I just wanted to share a few words after seeing some of you on Sunday 8 March 2026 at the Middleton Woods PECO Cross Country Relay. It was the first time I had seen members of the running community since the first Saturday in September 2025 and the welcome I received meant more to me than I can properly put into words.
For those who may not know, on 15 September 2025, I fell critically ill at home. I was placed into an induced coma and spent something like 7 or 8 days in this as well as a further couple more within Pinderfields Hospital intensive care being treated for Viral Encephalitis and pneumonia. The virus attacked and caused damage to my brain and has left me with a large number of ongoing physical and neurological challenges. Even now, many months later, I am still learning to live with the effects of these and every day brings new challenges.
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.