Arena 80's Caroline Hoyte took another step on her comeback trail with a fine run in the Reebok International Cross County Challenge at Margate.

Hoyte, who works as a biomedical scientist at Worthing Hospital, has tried to balance her job with being a mother, shift work and a balanced training programme.

Having just recovered from a cold, Hoyte finished 21st over the testing 5.5km course which was a pretty good effort in what was a high quality event.

She said: "I was only ten seconds away from 15th place which would have looked a lot better.

"I knew that I had not really been able to get the training I had wanted for a few weeks so I decided to race with out any real hope of doing myself justice.

"Sometimes I work all day and I am on call that night so I will sleep at work, but I am usually disturbed every half hour or so to do some tests.

"It is not really conducive to setting up a proper training programme but if I can steer clear of the colds than I feel I can do a lot better.

"I will miss next weekend's Sussex League event at Lancing as I shall be racing at Portsmouth on Sunday then I will probably race in the inter-counties at Abingdon the following week."

In the senior men's 9.5km most of the leading Sussex runners were missing so it was left to the promising Paul Rodgers, from Crawley, to lead the Sussex challenge with a fine 39th.

In the under-20 race Crawley's British League runner Ed Prickett continued his improvement with a brilliant run over the 6km course.

Never far away from the leaders, Prickett, the former All England Schools senior 3,000 metre champion, finished in fourth place and clocked 18min. 31sec, just six seconds outside the silver medal position.

It earned Prickett a place in the Britain junior team for the European Cross Country Championships in Coatia in two weeks time.

The junior women's race was combined with the under-17 event and the organisers allowed Charlotte Browning from Chichester, who is still in the under-15 age group, to compete over the 3.5km course.

Browning finished in 38th place in 12min. 55sec, beating many of the leading under-17 performers including Crawley's Charlotte Best who did not do herself justice after finishing in 54th place in 13min. 12sec.