Cork Marathon, East Cork T&F and Schools All Irelands - June 2nd, 2019

Cork Marathon, Half and Relay success

Although it is not a championship race the Cork Marathon weekend is a big one on the calendar. With the relay numbers included there are close to 10,000 people taking part.

This year we had considerable success across all races! Fiona who has finished 3rd and 2nd the last two years finally reached the top of the podium and won the Half Marathon in a new PB of 83.17 and more importantly €500 to be spent on a badly needed new pair or racers.

​Tim who has been keeping a low profile of late has obviously still been getting the miles in. He ran an excellent race to finish 2nd overall in the marathon in 2.25:52 and in the process beat 2:15 marathoner Sergio Ciobanu. Tim went through halfway in 71.30 and despite a few hallucinations in the last few miles held strong to hold his pace and finish comfortably clear of Sergio in the end.

​Kevin O'Leary was our next man home and was 6th overall in a very commendable 2.33:53. Kevin who is targeting Berlin later on in the year was using Cork as a tester as he has ran 3 track races in the last month alone, and is still hoping to set a few more PB's over the shorter distances this summer.

Niall Murphy was making his debut marathon for East Cork and finished in 41st overall in 3.04:31. Training showed Niall was in much better shape than and will be back for more after a few weeks of recovery.

Relays:

We had mens and a womens relay teams this year also. Our men were 4th overall in 2.34:37, although crucially they did not beat Tim and Kevin to the finish line. So some work will have to be done this winter to make sure this never happens again. Interesting Leevale who won the relay team title only passed out Tim with 2 miles to go, which again shows what a strong run he ran.

Our womens team also had an excellent run for 4th All-female team in 3.19:06. This was 30th overall out of nearly 650 teams. Well done all.


East Cork T&F Day 1​:

Results are not up yet for the East Corks that were on Bank Holiday Monday in CIT. Tim Crowley has however reliably informed me he did indeed win the mens Senior 1500m in 4.35 with Frank Hayes in 2nd. Further details will be later in the week when results come out.​


Special Mention - Frank O'Brien:

East Cork AC would like to congratulate training squad member Franko on his excellent Senior School 2k steeple victory in Tullamore on Saturday. In a very exciting race Frank showed excellent steepling technique over the water jump to stay in touch with the leaders in the middle part of the race and then showed a clean pair of heels to Daniel Stone of Belvedere College over the final 400m. Franks time of 6.01 is a PB of 13 seconds and puts him in position to realistically eye up a 9.15 3k time for the European U-20 Championships in Sweden in July.
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