James Sullivan for Jumping-The-Gun.com

There was success for John Travers at yesterday morning’s Rathfarnham 5K.

The Donore Harriers athlete claimed a convincing victory in a time of 14:21 around the streets of Rathfarnham and Terenure in Dublin, defeating DSD’s Brandon Hargreaves (14:37) and Kilkenny City Harriers’ Brian Maher (14:51) into second and third respectively.
“It felt very good and very comfortable,” remarked the 24 year old afterwards. “Jerry (Kiernan) said just go with the pace and pick it up, and that I shouldn’t have a problem winning with the way I’m running at the minute, so I was confident enough it was going to work out the way we planned. There was a group of three of us who broke away, and then it dwindled down to myself and Brandon coming to the 3K mark. So I kind of put the foot down to test the waters, and got a little bit of a gap and just kept going. It was a solid run.”

The 2015 European Indoor 1500m finalist is only recently back into winter training, after a brief rest period after the outdoor track season, and commented that the immediate focus is very much on cross-country, to build strength ahead of next year’s outdoor season and a tilt at Olympic qualification in the 1500m.
“The focus is now going to be on the Euro Cross. Obviously Rio is the bigger picture, but Euro Cross is a good shorter-term goal to tick off, so we’ve upped the miles at the minute.”

Meanwhile, in the women’s race, Teresa Doherty of Finn Valley took line honours with a clocking of 16:27, ahead of Crusaders duo Caroline Crowley (16:34) and Orla Drumm (16:43).
“The first mile was far too fast in 4:48. Then I kind of died from 2K to 3K, but I worked hard then for the rest of it,” said Doherty in the aftermath. “I knew Orla Drumm and Caroline Crowley were behind me, but I thought there would be more girls up there at the front to bring me along. I was hoping to run under 16:20 but it’s kind of hard when you’re out in front, but I had a good group of men around me so I just stuck in behind them.”
“Maybe if there was a girl in front of me, I’d have pushed harder to get a better time. You can get too lackadaisical. Overall though it was good.”