Track and field coach at St George’s College and massage therapist Garfield Gordon has added another road race championship to his ever-growing title wins in 5K and 10K road races, after he won the first place award in the 10K run category at the second staging of the EU-JA run held on Sunday, March 10 in downtown Kingston.

Gordon won the race in 28 minutes and 14 seconds.

Winning her first official 10K road race title was Isabella Allen, a research fellow at The University of the West Indies (The UWI). Allen won in a time of 36 minutes and 30 seconds.

An avid runner, Allen — an American citizen — shared that the EU-JA event was the second road race she was participating in since being on the island.

“I run primarily for leisure and to keep fit,” she said, adding that she mostly runs by herself at The UWI Mona Bowl.

Meanwhile, Gordon, a seasoned road runner representing the UCT Steppas, said that he has lost track of the number of 5K and 10K titles he has won since he started participating in road races.

Taking the second-place award in the 10K run for the male and female categories, respectively, were Evans Tetteh in 28 minutes and 25 seconds and Tonya Busse in 38 minutes and 10 seconds. Third place went to Kemar Leslie in the male category, finishing in 29 minutes and 27 seconds, while Natalie Brooks finished in 40 minutes and 24 seconds in the female category.

The 10K run category was added to the event this year and over 195 runners registered for this distance.

Dominating the 5K run were Papine High school student Sabrina McDonald, who won the female category in 23 minutes and 40 seconds and Jamaica College’s Dominic Amponsah, who took the male category in 16 minutes and 31 seconds. Second-place awards in the male and female categories went to Winston Dehaney and Michelle McNally, respectively, while Sanjay Ivery and Hoday Richards took third place in the male and female categories, respectively.

The Jamaica Constabulary Force emerged the winners in the 5K Run Champion team, while the largest team award went to the Bank of Jamaica.

The EU-JA 5K and 10K run was held under the theme “All together against crime and violence”, and forms part of the EU’s collective effort and responsibility of raising the social consciousness and awareness of the importance of having an ‘all hands-on deck’ approach to tackling the social vulnerabilities that are triggers for crime and violence.

Proceeds from the run will fund a summer literacy programme at several Corporate Area primary schools — among them Edward Seaga and Holy Family — and will be administered by the Creative Language Based Learning (CLBL) Foundation programme.