A small group from the club took part in day 2 of the Dublin Graded Meets on Wednesday in Tallaght in windy and wet conditions.

Jamie Fallon had a fine run in the men’s 1500m race, staying in the pack for the early laps before moving into the lead at the bell and outkicked from around 150m out to take a fine 2^nd place in an impressive 4:00.11 in the windy conditions.

The dark Dublin clouds unfortunately had gotten tired of waiting when the long jump started and poured down on the Tallaght tartan. As a result, Laura Cunningham had a nasty slip in her warm-up jumps which were just after a downpour. The slippy take-off board coupled with an unusual metal strip at the break-line contrived together to cause Laura’s takeoff plant to skid off towards the pit and Laura almost landed head first in the sand. Thankfully other than been very rattled, Laura did not sustain a serious injury as a result. It did however spoil the jumps for her as we decided the board was unsafe so best to adjust the mark to take off from behind the board on all her jumps. Laura registered a best of 4.41m into a -2m/s headwind from around 40cm behind the takeoff line, pretty impressive given the conditions and the setup and it was good enough to take second place.

Evan Hallinan was in action at the same time in the high jump in the windy conditions and cleared a best of 1.85m – solid jumping in the conditions and given that Evan is only just back from injury. It was Evan’s first time jumping since the National indoors so it was good to be back in competition.

With her race due to go off around 8.25pm, the rainfall delayed proceedings a little on the track and it was almost 9pm before Lorraine got called to the start-line for her 200m. The weather had worsened by now, with the wind picking up and the rainfall increasing. Lorraine had hoped to go under 28 seconds for the 200m but the conditions made that impossible with the -3 wind taking around 1.5 seconds off most of the athletes’ times. Lorraine ran strongly around the bend but the head-on wind knocked the stuffing out of everyone one and Lorraine finished 4^th in 29.24 – tough conditions but definitely a 27.xx there on a nicer day.