Berlin got the morning it was promised. Race organisers had spent the week pointing to a forecast of low-teens temperatures, overcast skies and light wind as the ingredients for a fast Sunday, and the early splits suggest the weather has delivered on that billing. Tigst Assefa wasted little of it: 15:30 through 5km put her on a projected finish of roughly 2:10:45, and by 10km, passed in 30:48, she had stretched what was a 25-second lead into 65 seconds over Rosemary Wanjiru and Dera Dida.
By 15km, reached in 46:13, that gap had grown further still, with Wanjiru and Dida both more than a minute back in 48:03 and 48:19 respectively. It is a decisive, early move rather than a cautious one, consistent with a build-up in which Assefa arrived unbeaten in seven consecutive marathons and described her own ambition on Friday only as a personal best — a target that, at this pace, she is comfortably inside.
The men's race is unfolding as a different kind of contest entirely. Four runners — Gabriel Geay, Erick Sang, Selemon Barega and Andamlak Belihu — have shared the pace through the opening third of the course, passing 15km together in 43:24 after a 10km split of 28:58-29:00 that still had roughly ten runners in touch. Where Assefa has raced alone from early on, the men's field is treating Berlin as a group effort for now, exactly the kind of pack-paced approach that tends to precede a genuine split later in a race built around chasing Eliud Kipchoge's 2:01:09 course record.
Not every story from the morning has been about pace. Esther Pfeiffer dropped out of the race at 13km, an early reminder that even a course and conditions built for fast times carry no guarantees, and that marathon attrition is as much a feature of a good morning as a bad one.
The shape of both races so far tracks closely with the picture this site's own coverage painted through race week: an Ethiopian-heavy men's field with the numbers to control the pace even without a single runner yet breaking clear, and a woman's field where the sharpest form on paper has translated directly into the sharpest move on the road. Both stories remain open. RTL's free-to-air coverage in Germany and FloTrack's stream in the US continue to follow both races toward finishes that, on this morning's evidence, look likely to reward exactly the runners who arrived in Berlin as favourites.