The Mark Ellis Blog

The indoor season of 2019/2020 was an interesting one for Lexie - it started with a change of coach and saw her take a greater focus on Hammer throwing as well as continuing with her Shot.  It has been a huge change for her, much more intense training and with older athletes too.  It's fair to say that it's taken a bit of time for her to get used to it, but she's a toughie and she's worked hard to establish herself in the group and worked hard at training too. That persistence and focus has certainly paid off over the indoor season.  Her pb was sitting at 10.22m with the Shot and that was from back in June 2019 at School Intercounties and she hadn't thrown close to that for quite a while.  The indoor season aim was to medal at the Northern Indoor Championships and regular readers will know that Lexie has a history of coming 4th at the Northern's and she's done that twice.  Her Shot technique has been changed a lot and the power was improving across the Win...

The challenge over the indoor season for Philippa was that lots of things changed - the move up to the U20 age group saw her to take on new challenges, especially as the hurdles went up in height for the first time in 4 years plus the Shot Put got a kilo heavier. It's fair to say that the hurdles were the biggest challenge and not so much in the height, more in the spacing.  A lot of work went in over the winter on the hurdles and her first race was at the Northern Indoor Open in Sheffield on the 7th December where she clocked 9.27 seconds - not a bad start.  The 4k Shot experience had started a little earlier with a 10.18m throw at the Gateshead Indoor Series back in November.  Back at the Northern Indoor Open, Philippa threw 10.42m in the Shot to give her a new pb. As we moved into 2020, the main competition targets for Philippa were the Northern Indoor Championships and the Scottish National Indoor Championships.  There was also a Combined Events feel to the...

There's been a lot of time spent in Leeds recently whilst Philippa is on her Youth Talent Pathway course with British Athletics & one of the contact days being on a Monday gave a bit of a gricing opportunity. There's been a lot of negativity on the Northern rail franchise and it will transfer to become a directly operated railway in a couple of weeks time. So, with a few hours to kill & an £8.10 West Yorkshire Day Rover ticket in prospect, it was time to head off in search of Pacers and wherever the mood took me...... The first trip was from Headingley into Leeds on a late running Knaresborough working which was particularly busy. Once I got to Leeds, it was a decision on where to go next - there was a Knottingley departure that I thought might be a Pacer but turned out to be 158, so I thought I'd try something new as 195123 was sitting on a Manchester Victoria departure via Bradford. Ideally, I was wanting to head to Huddersfield for a trip towards Sh...