The Club's Men's Masters Team was competing in the Eastern Masters Track & Field League Final at Milton Keynes on Saturday 19th September.
In the qualifying League matches through the summer Bedford had been the top qualifying team and Milton Keynes the second best across the whole of the Eastern Region.
With the Final of the Top 8 teams being at Milton Keynes , the home club had orchestrated a major campaign to seize back the Trophy that Bedford won last year.
This looked to be aided by the absence of some of Bedford's top Masters athletes through illness, injury and family commitments.
However, Team Manager Jim Keech was not prepared to let Milton Keynes have an easy ride and through skilful deployment of the available resources (who had ever seen Bob Kingman Long, High and Triple Jumping before?) was able to rise to the challenge and set the standard throughout the day.
Despite an unfortunate disqualification in the relay at the end of the day Bedford still ran out winners with 319 pts to Milton Keynes' 294.5 and 3rd placed Cambridge & Coleridge on 251 pts.
A very convincing winning margin created through a very large number of individual event wins - too many to list all but including Scott Johnson M35 HJ, Peter Benedickter M50 400m and 400m Hurdles, Adam Hills A string Walk, John Borgars in the B string walk, Bob Kingman in the M35 PV(he is in the next age group up!), Andy Leach in the M60 3000m and Anthony S in the M70 3000m, Following Simon Coombes in the M50 3000m, Graeme Packman in the M70 shot and Discus and Tenny James in the M60 300m Hurdles and more.
And many, many good 2nd places too.
A very successful end to the season demonstrating Bedford & County to be the top Men's Masters Athletics Club in the East of England.
Next year's task has to be to have the same success with the Ladies.
