Baking conditions welcomed the London Marathon on Sunday.

A troop of Eccleshill Road Runners went down armed with months of training.

Andrew Dyson, Sophie Withnall, Dawn Hogan, Gill Jones, Susan Birbeck and Hazel Maddocks all finished.

Withnall knocked four minutes off her previous best with a time of 4hrs 31mins 11secs – despite having a “blip at the 14th mile requiring attention from the medics”.

Ilkley Harriers had nine runners in the melee. Several achieved PBs, with Julian Carter’s 44min 52sec improvement the more dramatic of the bunch.

Carter finished in 3:35:07, following Andy Wiggans (3:11:25) and with Jann Smith, Daniel Ibbotson, Martin Wright, Paul Sugden, Emma O’Looney and Mike Picken in tow.

Saltaire Striders’ Will Kerr ran for charity as a Roman centurion and still clocked 2:57:25, alongside club-mates Amir Khan (3:14:56) and Jen Willingham (3:53:47).

Bingley Harriers’ Stephen Broadbent led the blue-and-white hoops over the line in 2:44:52 with James Robinson and Richard Balshaw also running sub-three hours (2:50:17 and 2:52:19 respectively).

Pudsey Pacers’ Paul Gaile ran a PB of 2:46:08, as did Otley’s Tom Midgley (3:00:33), while Nigel Bedell (2:46:10) and Amy Green (3:09:51) were first male and female from Keighley & Craven.

In the Boston Marathon on Monday, sceptics of the sub two-hour marathon have been muffled after Kenyan Geoffrey Mutai won in 2hrs 3min 2sec, beating Haile Gebrselassie’s time by almost a minute.

The time cannot be the official new world record, however, due to the downhill aspect of the Boston course and the tailwind on the day.

The classic Boston course has some killer inclines, including Heartbreak Hill at 20 miles, so Claire Elener and Rob Sutton (Eccleshill RR) did well to finish in 3:55:50 and 3:54:00 respectively.

Another performance of note came from Sarah Jarvis (Bingley), who left her competitors for dust in the Lochaber Marathon the previous weekend.

Jarvis’s 2:52:33 was an emphatic first among the women winners and seventh overall. She was running her first marathon.