Grandma P's Ramblings Through Life

Yesterday could be viewed in two ways by the young people who competed at the Sussex County Schools Championships. For some it was the pinnacle of their achievement to be representing their area at a big athletics meeting.
For a few others it may prove to have been the first stepping stone on an illustrious career.
The very best of the athletes will travel north to Gateshead in July to represent the County at the all England Schools Championships.
Many Olympic medallists began by becoming All England Champion in their age group.

Our J won a gold medal at these championships - it must be 20 years ago now. His time wasn't good enough in the 400 metre hurdles to take him to the All England Schools, but he did represent the county at Inter Counties matches.

Bill and I attend these meetings as timekeepers. We have passed tests and have a great deal of experience. Sometimes we work alongside electronic timing and this confirms our own skills for we normally end a day of timekeeping with an average error against the electric timing of about 3 hundredths of a second. It may look easy - but I can assure that a novice timekeeper can be easily a tenth of a second wrong and sometimes more. I once worked with somebody who managed to be 6 tenths of a second out in a 100 metre race!


Here is a picture of most of yesterday's team on the timekeeping steps.
We work hard and concentrate hard but also enjoy meeting up with friends who we see often or others we might see just once a year. There is always lots of talk and laughter.
Yesterday the weather was really hot and so the black blazers which we often wear were not needed.







Here, we are looking across to the other side of the track half way through an 800 metre race.
You can see a collection of starters in red, chatting and waiting for the start of the next race.
The track judges are checking the numbers of the girls running past the bell (out of shot). Jenny, in pink, is calling out the times that each girl has taken to run the first lap.






This picture was taken from the timekeeper's steps.
A lad is about to hit the take off board in the long jump and in the distance, somebody is in the cage about to throw a discus.
Beyond that you can just see a part of the new buildings for Thomas Bennett School.



The officials normally take great pride in making sure that a meeting keeps to the timetable. But circumstances altered that yesterday.
There was a fire alarm from inside the sports centre and every person in the building and in the athletics stand were asked to walk over to the far side of the track. This was inconvenient for us - but worse for the competitors at the swimming gala or the sellers at a toy collectors' fair. We believe it was a false alarm.







It probably did us good to get up and walk about. Timekeepers can be busy on uncomfortable seats for many hours. But having seats is better than no seats at all, which we find at some tracks.
You can see that there are hundreds of people at the far end of the back straight waiting for the all clear.
In the foreground are some of the time keepers - I am the one in white on the left of the group.



This is the first season that this track has been in use. It has been crammed into a site which is slightly too small, I think. The track is big enough of course, but we would prefer a little more space around it. There have been some early problems which still have to be solved - but at least the builders changed the position of the timekeepers' steps in time for the first meeting. It obviously had not occurred to them that we need to be sitting right in line with the finish to be accurate.
I am sure that before too long the Crawley Athletics Club will feel that this track is home and the club will renew its strengths and become a force to be reckoned with.