HE is keeping his fingers crossed he will have a chance to qualify for the Australian Cross Country Championships, but Aaron Houston has already produced some fine runs in 2021.
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On Saturday he posted a personal best effort of 17 minutes flat to be the first of the 102 runners home in Bathurst parkrun.
It was the ninth time Houston had picked up a win, the effort in wet and cool conditions highlighting how much he has improved across the 53 times he has tackled the Bathurst course.
On debut in 2018 it took him 20:56 to cover the five kilometre course on the banks of the Macquarie River.
"That's a PB, but I think I could still go a bit quicker, I slipped in the last couple of hundred metres," Houston said.
"It's a pretty good feeling to run a time like that yeah. We're pretty lucky to have parkrun or else I wouldn't have much to test my fitness other than playing with my dog at home."
It was the fifth time this year Houston had lowered his personal best mark, the effort coming just over a month after he took out the boys' secondary multi class event at the 2021 New South Wales CIS Cross Country Championships.
He led his division all the way through the 3km course at Eastern Creek, stopping the clock in 11:40.1.
Those efforts show Houston is in good form as he works towards his goal of racing at the Australian Cross Country Championships.
In 2019 when he competed at the national level, Houston placed fourth outright and second in his under 16s para event and second in his T20 classification.
To qualify for nationals, he first has to do well at state.
"I'm hoping state cross country in Nowra is on, that's the one you go to if you want to try and get to nationals. So I'm going to do that and make nationals if they're on this year hopefully," he said.
"That's in about six weeks, they've postponed it already a month, it was supposed to be this weekend. But hopefully it will be on soon.
"I've been lucky with training because I've had holidays, once a week I've been doing a double-day, so some of my weeks have been 88 kays, some of my weeks have been pretty big weeks."
Second place in Saturday's parkrun, 20 seconds behind Houston, belonged to Miller Rivett. Max Martinez, Will Kelly and Gavin Hill rounded out the top five while Kellie Gibson (23:29) was the first female runner to finish.
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