Adrian Edwards advises: The next Sunday afternoon track session, open to any walkers who want to come along will be on Sunday 17th March at Woodbank Park track, Stockport from 12 noon.

Following our posts on the year 1958, Ron is hard at work piecing together the story of 1959. In the meantime we’ll share with you other material we unearth as it’s dug up! Find below a first club newsletter from July 1965, which was the forerunner of the CONTACT magazine. Reading between the lines you can sense a feeling of frustration that the club was not doing itself justice.

I’ve inserted here Guy Goodair’s amusing reminiscence of that Manchester-Blackpool race

1965

Wakefield had a full team this year and a Wakefield runner, Barry Fletcher looked after us – three weeks later I reciprocated by looking after Barry when he won the Liverpool to Blackpool Road Running race. There was a bunch of five early on but after 15 miles Mick Holliman & I drew away with George Barras & John Hampshire not far behind.

George Barras had an unsettling moment in Chorley when he was almost knocked over by a car coming out of a side street and had to jump on the car’s front fender to avoid being knocked down!  Once we’d passed Preston we faced a tremendous headwind which made progress hard work. The difficulties increased after St Annes when drifting sand kept blowing across the road into our eyes as well as sticking to the Vaseline we’d put on our nipples and armpits, acting like sandpaper.

Mick & I were still ‘neck & neck’ after the South Pier then Mick looked round for his attendant – the lady on the bike in the photo. Barry, my attendant, immediately screamed at me “Go, Go – you’ve got him!” I tried to increase my pace and managed to open up a 200-yard gap which I held to the finish. Wakefield packed well with George Barras 4th.

The race report in the Daily Telegraph by Peter Keeling referred to me as ‘Goodair,
bespectacled and slightly built’. For years afterwards every time Chris Bolton rang me he
would enquire if he was speaking to ‘the bespectacled and slightly built Goodair’!

1 G Goodair (Wakefield) 8.29.07 2 M Holliman (Highgate) 8.30.05 3 K Abolins (Royal Sutton Coldfield) 8.43.11
Team Wakefield 17 pts, 44 finished