As a sport, combined events is certainly no soft touch; it ranks up there with the toughest of them. It’s for powerfully built people that usually don’t have the talent to be victorious at one of the single events. Training for it is like a full time job – Moscow 80 & LA 84 decathlon champion Daley Thompson used to spend his day at the track, and I’m sure Jessica Ennis does the same. Thankfully it didn’t drag onto two days or more like it usually does.

The first event for Enright was the high jump, and three failures at the minimum opening height of 1.30m meant that he’d no points bagged; in fact the only thing he was going away with was a sliced lower back and metal burn from the outdated aluminium bar. The thing was that if he scissor kicked it he would probably have got over, but he tried a pathetic attempt at a Fosbury flop using the wrong takeoff foot (or maybe even off two feet which would have been a foul). However it’s a technical event rather than a talent-based one, and with practice it can be mastered to jumping far above your own height.

Next up were the nipple high (1.10m) sprint hurdles. Now lanes, high hurdles, starting blocks, false starts, pressure applied to the blocks, reaction times, dipping at the line, photo finishes, steward’s enquiries; what would a road runner know about any of these? Not a thing. Well in fact Enright easily cleared all five of them with plenty to spare, and survived it. When people clip or knock them (or fall) it’s because they want to just glide over them rather than expending too much vertical energy (which slows you down of course).

Then there was the long jump, another technical event for explosive people who have superb speed. An average showing here by Enright, but there were plenty of other novices in the same ball park of 4m. Better long jumpers firstly generate superb velocity on the straight. Then after foot plant they push all their weight upwards from the thigh/gluteal areas, and their momentum gains them the distance. People not up on the technique tend to stay lower to the ground, kind of like running through it instead of jumping.

Getting hungry at this stage, but there was no time for food as it was into the concrete block throwing festival (or shot putt as it’s usually known). Up against big huge rugby guys that would rather be in the pub watching the France match than in a Baltically cold converted hay barn, Enright gave as good as he got here too. Or maybe we should re-phrase that – stick with cross country running. His last throw was a foul as the ball had left his jaw before leaving the circle. Another words you must push it out, rather than a hooked style soccer goalkeeper’s long throw.

Having been on the first bus down from Dublin at cock crow, at 18:30 the final event of the elongated day took place – a 1 kilometre run. Enright had been looking forward to this all day as a revenge opportunity on the rest of the lads. Their aerobic fitness wouldn’t have a patch on someone running 60m a week and that’s from a specialist running club. Would it not? Well Enright found himself last at the gun after an aggressive opening lap of 27 seconds. The Sportsworld representative went through in 30-31, but even this felt too fast. But bit by bit he managed to pick people off, reminding himself along the way that this was his event over the rest of them. It wasn’t though, as it was won by a 400m hurdler who, if kept going for another three laps would have ran a 4:09 mile.

And so it was to the end of proceedings. With the top six competitors getting points for their college in every event, Enright failed to score any points for his college (only two out of our four athletes did). Mission failed. Moral of the story – don’t attempt competing in something that you haven’t trained for. Applies to everything. However he set some DIT records that will hopefully be around for a long time to come.

IUAA Indoor Male Combined Events 2010

Place

Name

College

60mH

1000m

HJ

LJ

SP

Total

1

Paul Byrne

DCU

8.91

2:44.80

1.85

6.32

8.22

766

821

670

657

379

3293

2

John Fagan

DCU

8.95

2:35.80

1.75

5.81

8.87

757

921

585

546

418

3227

3

William Finnegan

NUIG

9.84

3:09.30

1.65

5.84

9.12

572

576

504

552

433

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td style="vertical-align: top; width: 36.15pt;">

2637

4

Joe Barry

CIT

10.25

2:56.90

1.50

5.49

9.25

495

695

389

479

441

2499

5

Rory Moloney

UL

12.47

2:46.50

1.55

4.54

6.18

172

803

426

297

259

1957

6

Damien Walsh

WIT

11.02

3:08.30

1.35

="margin: 0pt; text-align: center;">4.61

6.43

365

585

283

310

274

1817

7

Donal McCann

NUIG

10.20

DNF

1.60

5.73

8.94

504

0

464

529

422

1919

8

Packie Enright

DIT

12.97

2:55.30

0

4.15

6.35

100

711

0

230

269

1310

9

Seán McMahon

UU

DNS

DNS

1.65

DNS

DNS

0

0

504

0

0

504

Do i need to say who the report is by?

Fingers crossed for Ticknock (Jan 24th) – another great race and very accessible – just behind Marley Park.

The Leinster Senior Cross Country on Sunday is also postponed, new date Feb 14th 2010.

Eoin has done some great work gathering information on the best times for a number of events.

Club Titles under the Our Club tab, has a list of the various titles that our club runners have picked up over the years. Thanks to eoin o’brien for trawling the AAI website for the results. With the start of the XC season, we expect this list to be extended in the coming months.

We’ve also created a Sportsworld Terenure Forum where anybody in the club can ask questions and exchange ideas. We’ll see how it goes.

Good luck to everyone running the dublin novice XC in the pheonix park tomrrow at 1.

As a lot of you know Emily organises training sessions on Saturday and Sunday mornings. These are normally in Phoenix park or in Irish town stadium but can be in other places. Sometimes people miss the thursday training session, when the weekend training is mentioned, and don’t know what sessions are on over the weekend and where and when to meet, and some people don’t even realise people train on weekends (imagine).

A while ago Lucy can up with the brilliant idea of sending web texts out to people about training sessions, upcoming races, drinking sessions etc. Web texts can be sent from mobile phone provider websites(O2, vodaphone) for free without any cost to the sender or receiver.

So if you are feeling guilty about lying in a nice warm bed saturday and sunday mornings and you would like to be included in the weekend training sessions webtext, sent out Fridays, then email your mobile number on. Normally the training sessions include going for coffee and breakfast afterward. If you are not comfortable about emailing me your mobile number you can send it to Lucy at (see Michael & Lucy at clubhouse) and she can webtext you.

So hope to see Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Michael