T&T's Tonya Nero as she rep­re­sent­ed the red, white and black with im­mence pride when she par­tic­i­pat­ed at the first Com­mon­wealth Half-Marathon in Cardiff, Wales on Sun­day. She crossed the fin­ish af­ter the 13.1 miles jour­ney in a time of 1:17.05 which was her sea­son best to fin­ish 21st out of 9,323 women. Over­all she place 131st out of 18,966 fin­ish­ers.

That is two min­utes and 50 sec­onds faster than what she record­ed on the same course in 2016. She said af­ter, "I'm al­ways very grate­ful for the op­por­tu­ni­ty to run and rep­re­sent. Thank­ing God for this won­der­ful gift."

The event at­tract­ed in­ter­na­tion­al run­ners from 18 na­tions in a street bat­tle in the Welsh cap­i­tal.

Nero who did 5:54 sec­onds per mile told Guardian Me­dia Sports, "The race was great. The weath­er was per­fect for a race day: no wind and cool. It was al­so a big race so I had lots of ath­letes to run with through­out. I felt great dur­ing the run. I ran with gloves on just in case I got too cold but I felt great. I still have some work to do to im­prove my times but this has been my fastest half marathon for the year so far."

The reign­ing UWI Half-marathon women's cham­pi­on added, "For the rest of the sea­son I'm plan­ning oth­er races in be­tween but I'm main­ly fo­cus­ing on build­ing my strength to go the dis­tance."

Mean­while, an­oth­er T&T long dis­tance run­ner, Sjae­lan Evans fin­ished the Chica­go Marathon yes­ter­day in 3:10:44 plac­ing 260th among the women. There were over 21,000 women in the field of 45,000 in to­tal.