Some more information from Matt Fawson over in Athens, checking out the race while preparing for his 24hr début.

Matt writes :

“All leaders were looking very strong and are no doubt firmly focused on getting to halfway at which point I think we have ourselves a race.

William’s pace does not look to have changed at all since Monday evening and the two German contenders were looking very relaxed.

Could be that they were looking forward to getting their heads down for a bit.

Hiromo, the Japanese female competitor was positively flying last night and think she is now keen on stepping her pace up a bit. ”

“Well, “Mrs Thorpe”, I talked with the guy [from championchip Greece, Mr Nikos Polias) who responded to your mail last night at the race. Incidentally, he is a former Olympic marathon runner, who finished in 18th place at the 2004 Athens games.

He has told me that site updates will continue on a 12-hour basis. At the time I went down there, the server for the timing devices was experiencing some problem and the runners could not see anything on the display, so laps, distances etc were being written on a white board. Old school.

Before leaving, the display seemed to be up and running again.

Admittedly, this is unusual as ChampionChip is typically a very reliable system and it is strange to see these type of problems. One can understand a display going down momentarily after running for a few days, but the site updates? Strange.”

Thanks to Matt for this

Shaun