Mountbatten school early morning run

Wednesday kicks off with the first Mountbatten school 'cross country run'.
For the past year I've been joining Peter Faulkner and Ceri Mitchell at 7.30am and taking the keen runners out for a couple of miles. When I started about 5 or 6 used to turn up. Now its over 30!
Whatever the weather these youngsters turn up in just shorts and tee-shirts to be part of it.
They have a great culture of inclusiveness and encouragement at their school.

Because Poppy runs each week, I get to lead the girls group. This week the squad is a dozen girls ranging from year 7 to 11. Once we'd got over the usual 'Can we stay inside Sir?', 'Can we just run round the field Sir?' We set of on our marathon run to Tadburn.
A few minutes in I had to call in the emergency helicopter to return 2 of the runners to school - it transpired that the broken leg one of them had sustained at swimming the night before had flared up again. Apparently the knee strapping hadn't fixed it. The rest trekked on until a collapsed lung brought the whole group to a standstill. As we were miles from civilization and had already called the helicopter out the only option was to run for it - crawl if we had to...
Fortunately we all made it back alive. In fact most of them managed a sprint for the last 400m. Obviously the desire to get back to school was overwhelming.

Two miles in 25 minutes. Not a bad start to the year.