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The marathon on May 4th 2008 was only the seventh marathon in Cracow and we were not very amazed by the rather poor website of this great event. The weather forecast was another disappointment. Unlike Saturday and also Monday, the weather during the race on Sunday morning was uninviting. About 12 degrees and rain, that created little puddles of water along the track and made it unavoidable to eventually step right into a huge puddle sometime during the 42-kilometer-run.

Still, we were eager to participate and it turned out to be an awesome event. The rain and the relatively low temperature was refreshing and the puddles, well, they still sucked but at some point you just stop caring.

The organization of the event was great. On Saturday there was a Pasta-Party to carbon-up a bit, and after the run there were plenty of masseurs that provided the necessary “first help”. Probably we could have gotten even more cool services, but most the information was provided only in Polish and “Przepraszam, ale nie rozumiem po polsku” (Sorry, but I don’t speak Polish).

Ready for action: Sven Ahlheid, Daniel Jaeger and Alex Boschmann (from left to right)

While the responsibles must have been really happy that Andrey Gordeyev broke the course record, Daniel and me were equally thrilled for having achieved our respective goals of 4:44:44h and 3:59:59. Daniel who was accompanied during the race by marathon-experienced Alexander Boschmann won his bet and ran his first marathon in the amazing time of 4:44:04 (against all odds and expectations one might add!) and I was able to finish in 3:51:13 and am very pleased with this result.

All in all, the Cracow Marathon was a great experience and we can only recommend anybody to participate in it. We certainly will want to run another marathon here in Cracow.

More pictures and information in German can be found on Daniel Jaeger’s personal Cracow Marathon blog entry.

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