East Hull runner wins in Amsterdam

EAST Hull Harriers runner Jonathan Frost picked up the biggest win of his athletics career by seeing off 9,000 runners to win the Amsterdam Half Marathon.

The 23-year-old, who works at Start Fitness in Beverley, went to Holland with a group of runners from the club – with some taking part in the marathon in the morning and some in the 13-mile race immediately following this.

Frost was only in 10th place at the halfway stage of the half marathon, but made a concerted effort in the last six miles and managed to catch the long-time leader from Spain with just 800m to go.

Frost ended up winning in a time of 1hr 10.49min, just shy of his personal best, to take the adulation of the large crowd that had amassed to watch the end of the race in the stadium used for the 1928 Olympic Games.

The Bilton resident has had mixed fortunes running on the roads in 2009.

He came an impressive 29th out of over 24,000 finishers at the London Marathon in April, in a time of 2hr 25.3min, but was then sidelined for most of the summer by shin splints.

But Frost made a triumphant return to action over the weekend against top runners from countries like France, Spain and Holland.

He told the Mail: "I do a lot of the local races in this area and I don't usually win because we have the likes of Darren Bilton and Steve Bateson who are really good runners.

"So to go somewhere like Amsterdam and win like I did was really special, especially to finish in the Olympic Stadium.

"I took the race quite cautiously from the start because of the injury I had, which meant I could only train on grass most of the summer.

"But the second half of the race I really went for it and just put my foot down - if I had done that for the whole race I would have got a personal best for sure."

The athlete, who also runs second claim on the track for Kingston upon Hull, will now tackle the cross country season to build up to running the Edinburgh Marathon next year.