W45-49: Wickstrom Wires It from Prospect Park to Central Park

• Kelly Wickstrom won the W45-49 age group in 1:25:36 (6:32/mi), the only finisher in this group to break 1:26.
• Minji Wong ran the 82nd-fastest women's split on the 20K→Finish stretch to rocket from 257th to 196th among women and claim 3rd in W45-49 in 1:28:19 — a decisive late charge.
• Leah Mark matched Wong's closing surge with the 116th-fastest women's 20K→Finish split, but Wong's faster kick kept her a step ahead: 1:28:19 to 1:28:53.
• Places 7 through 9 produced a genuine jumble: Aya Leitz (8th, 1:32:22) finished 25 seconds ahead of Taeya Konishi Schogel (7th, 1:32:26) in the official order — a reminder that timing precision runs deeper than the clock on the wall.

Kelly Wickstrom, 48, from New York, ran the kind of race that looks effortless in hindsight but demands patience in real time. She opened in the middle of the women's pack — 186th among women — and spent the first half working steadily forward. By the 10K mark she was 155th, and by the finish she had climbed all the way to 114th among women, closing at 6:32/mi to win W45-49 by more than two minutes. Her second-half effort ranked 71st among all women on that stretch, a sharp indicator of where she really turned the screws.

Behind her, Alison Steele (45, Niwot, CO) was the model of consistent forward progress — moving from 253rd to 182nd among women across every checkpoint — to finish 2nd in 1:27:50 at 6:42/mi. Then came the race's best subplot: Minji Wong and Leah Mark both fading through the middle miles before unleashing strong closing kicks. Wong, running from San Francisco, drifted back to 257th among women at 20K before her 82nd-fastest women's closing split hauled her all the way to 196th at the line — good for 3rd in 1:28:19. Mark made almost the same move, sinking to 270th before rallying to 209th, but Wong's closing pace was simply sharper, and 34 seconds separated them at the tape.

Alysia Steinmann (5th, 1:30:55) and Sarah Wells (6th, 1:31:03) rounded out a competitive top six, separated by just eight seconds, with a field of 1,207 W45-49 finishers stretching out behind them across a crisp, clear 40-degree morning in New York.