15 days to the Lago Maggiore Half Marathon (*)

With the ending of the second phase of the enrollment for the 4th edition of the Lago Maggiore Half Marathon ("LMHM"), we can finally provide statistics about participation to this fascinating competition that will be held on March 6 2011. It looks like that this "brand new" race will be competing to the top league of half Marathon in Italy: the number of enrollment at the end of January were already 1,570 which represents as an increase of about 13% compared to last year. If the trend continues, the LMHM will become in the top 7 of the Italian league for Half Marathon.
This year the LMHM course starts from Stresa and goes to Verbania, and it will be all along the Lake Maggiore, providing to the runners one of the most beautiful and evocative of the world. This explains the success of the competition. Finally, LMHM is also very fast. On the same course in 2009 (each year there will be swap from departure and arrival), all three best timing in Italy have been performed on the lake: the Tanzanian Ezekiel Jafari Ngimba completed the 2009 competition with the best  time of 1h00'41", followed by the Kenyans Jacob Kiplagat Yator (1h00'43") and David Kemboi Kiyeng (1h00'44 ").


"Registration continues quite well - said Paul Otto, Chairman of Sport PRO-MOTION - and we are comforted by the comparison, far more positive, with last year. There are all premises that we can break the 2010 record of runners."
The number of subscriptions is also function of the increase of international runners. Runners from 25 countries have already enrolled: from Australia, France, Great Britain, Greece, Malta, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Serbia, Sweden, Switzerland, Hungary and the USA, to Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Ethiopia, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg, Romania, Slovakia and Spain.
Obviously the Italian athletes are the most numerous, followed by Swiss runners: there are 44 members so far in fact the Swiss athletes. Moreover, in Italy, there are only 4 regions that are not yet been represented: Umbria, Abruzzo, Molise, Calabria.

It is worthwhile to notice that on the 16th of October there will also be the first edition of the Lago Maggiore Marathon (stay tuned for the details...)

(*) adapted and enriched from the original Italian document on the Podisti.net site.