After some very cold days before the Marathon with temparature below 10C° the sun was shining for the 3rd Salzburg AMREF Marathon and its participants. Even before the start of the Marathon, a new record was achieved. 2302 athletes were warming up for the race. “Over 20.000 on-lookers were encouraging the runners”, reported by the security people.
At 9. am the race was started. From the beginning the Kenyans Josephat Kiprono Rotich (Marathon), Jematia Chemaringo and Caleb Ngetich (both Halfmarathon) were leading. They were running their “race in the race”. Caleb Ngetich won the Halfmarathon with a time of 1:04:51 and was below his time from last year. The second position took Christian Bruendlinger (1:13:38) and the third place Christian Hirner (1:13:48) both from Austria The fastest woman at the Halfmarathon was Jematia Chemaringo with a fabulous time of 1:21:10 followed by Birgit Koch (1:22:32) from Germany and Lauren Martin (1:23:03) from Salzburg.
The 28 year old Jesephat Kiprono Rotich who was also the winner of the Marathon 05 had some problems with his injured ankle but still won this Charity Marathon with a time of 2:27:42. “I nearly wanted to give up but as I was running for AMREF, I was fighting to win this race” he said after the flower ceremony which was in attendance of the Ambassador of Kenya Julius Kiplagat Kandie, the Mayor of Salzburg, and the Ambassadors of Good Will Catherine Ndereba and Patrick Sang as well as the Chairpersons of AMREF Germany and AMREF Sweden and Director Dr. Peter Ngatia from AMREF HQ. The second was Gerhard Woerndl (2:31:15) and the third Herbert Gruber (2:36:14).
The womans winner of the distance of 42, 195 km was Sabine Hofer (2:56:31) followed by the German Ilse Wieshuber, who was only 20 sec. behind. Monika Schuessler-Kafka was the third who reached the finishing line. All the participants were running not only to win, they were running for AMREFs work and Visions.
