The weather was wet and windy with the North West getting an overdose of high winds and heavy rains. This wasn’t enough to prevent another fantastic turnout for Foyle Valley at last Wednesday evenings Sean Furey Insurances Buncrana 5K, with forty athletes donning the ‘purple vests’and representing our club.

As luck would have it there was a timely break in the rain and an easing of the strong winds to allow semi-dry conditions to prevail for the duration of the race. The luck didn’t stretch to a complete calm and the first half the race was still into a strong southerly head wind. Traditionally this is a fast course but everyone had to work hard for their times on this occasion. The winning runs were very, very impressive with, Letterkenny’s Ciaran Doherty and Finn Valley’s Teresa McGloin at the head of the field.

Scott Rankin produced another great performance with a PB of 15:27 for fourth spot. Chris McGuinness collected a PB (16:35) to hold off the consistently tenacious Pius McIntyre (16:38). Dara McNulty, Ryan Gallagher, Brian Kelly and Ciaran Graham all comfortably broke the 18 minute mark with Paul Slavin(18:08) narrowly missing out. There was great grouping with Keith Shiels, Martin Dunleavy, Mark Linton, Teague Whoriskey, Declan and Kevin Doherty all finishing within a 10 second spread either side of 18:30 and promising runs from Barry Dinsmore, Colly and Tony Doherty. Declan Daly, Michael Houston showed well amongst many other good performances.

For the ladies it was a case of the ‘sisters doing it for themselves’ with Dawn McDaid (18:53) finishing fourth lady overall, picking up a category prize but was closely followed home by Sister Rosie O Brien (18:58). Martina McMullen (20:13) put in tremendous run to be the next lady home for the valley and there were great showings from Maria McGonagle, Trish McClintock and Kate Meehan.

It was a tremendous occasion despite the weather and with 293 runners a great success for City of Derry. Next stop on the Furey series will be Culmore and then onto Carndonagh. Hopefully we will be battling soaring temperatures, high UV indexes, pollen counts and de-hydration at the next outing!!

Other Category Winners
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Gerry Duddy, Peter Lilburn and Christy McMonagle won the M45, M55 and M65 categories Letterkenny pair Joe English and Kevin Toner picked up the M50 and M60 prizes. Miriam Bonner Bridgeen Byrne, Una Gavin and Roisin Lynch in the F45, F50 and F60 categories

The U20 awards went to Letterkenny’s Adam Friel with a 16m 44s clocking and Eillen Mc Kinney who ran 22m 13s.

Results here