The Melbourne Marathon route comes past our front door, which is very close to the white dot on St Kilda Rd.
A clip from the Marathon fly over page. The arrow points to our apartment.
The lead vehicle: note how dark it is, This is at about the 5km mark.
The lead pack: Kipchoge is on the kerb side.
Looking South with the pack of cyclists trying to keep up with the leaders.
This pack includes the 1st and 2nd female at 4km. The eventual winner is the blonde woman with a yellow top, towards the rear.
Density is increasing.
In the distance isn't hard enough ... Note: from the clothes, that is not the blokes referred to in
this ABC article.
The orange flag indicates this is the 3 hour aspirants.
Trams continued to run past 505! It must have been stressful for the drivers as not a few spectators seemed unaware of the trams.
The reason for this image was the quite upmarket camera on the LHS being operated by a guy on a bike. A high risk activity IMO.
The next are taken from our Winter Garden.
We took our walk in the Park to Toorak Rd and then walked back along St Kilda Rd. As it got close to 0800 hrs I went out onto the middle of the road to watch the leaders come through. There was a bit of a lag but I passed the time chatting to Claudia, from a building a few up the road from 505 (who was running the Half, starting at 9:45 when the temperature was forecast as 19C). She was tracking, on her phone,
Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya, who was leading, on a tracker app. The app was fairly hopeless in Albert Park showing them running the Lake in reverse!
The motorcycles suggest he is getting close.
Here he is, looking as though he is going rather smoothly.
He was about 90 seconds in front of #2, after whom there was a big gap - at least 4 minutes to #3. I liked this group of followers on bikes with trailers.
Leading female who was I think just 2nd when they came past of the way out.
Here are the results. For the blokes I am very surprised that the first 2 were both in the 40-44 category. Kipchoge has
an incredible history. According to what is shown on wikipedia
Thomas Do Canto has a solid background but his time today was his PB by about 4 minutes.
The winner of the female event (can one call a New Zealander a Sheila?)
Camille French has had some good results but this would seem to be a career highlight.
Sinead Diver has won this race in the past and this result is outstanding for someone about to hit age 50!
Then it was the turn of the half marathon. Here is the male leader.
And here the female.
The bunches were closer than for the full.
From memory this was the density of runners around the 90 minute flag.
Looking North on St Kilda Rd.
Looking South.
The ones heading North are doing the full in 4:30. Not long after this three motorbikes came through leading the male leader in the half, who just about had his nose in the exhaust of the rear bike (couldn't get a photo).
An image from our Wintergarden looking at Fitzroy St. These are runners in both directions in both races. I hope the finish system is up to the job.
Ibid. Note also the huge toy Kangaroo on a nearer balcony.
After the event there is a clean up (for the Marathon, unlike the Grands Prix). This was the scene looking from the tram stop South. There were at least 6 street sweeping trucks there.
Humans were involved --
As well as the machines.
The residual water was emptied from the tanks.
.... which were rolled to trucks ...
... and trailers ..
and away.
It appears from comments I have seen on Facebook that this quality of clean up was not so evident in some other parts of the course. There seems to have been a lack of concern by runners about discarding gel wrappers, especially in Albert Park. A particularly colourful comment was
"They've left it looking like a festival hangover scattered with used condom packets."
.
Comments