Broken Arrow 18K F50-59: Plew-Hearne Holds Off a Late Charge to Take the Title
- Tj Plew-Hearne wins in 2:49:12 (15:08/mi), becoming the first F50-59 finisher across the line among 31 competitors.
- 62 seconds — the margin separating 1st from 2nd; Shawn Sekel's 2:50:14 was the closest anyone got to Plew-Hearne.
- Sarah McMahan entered the top third of the women's field early, running as high as 27th among women, before fading to 44th by the finish — still claiming 3rd in F50-59 in 2:55:05.
- Jennifer Anderson made the most relentless forward march of the day: from 68th among women at the first checkpoint all the way to 48th at the finish, landing 4th in F50-59 in 2:58:45.
Tj Plew-Hearne owned the F50-59 race from the front half onward. She entered the final stretch already climbing through the women's field — moving from 49th among women at the first checkpoint to 32nd by the finish — and sealed the win with the 23rd-fastest women's split on the High Camp–to–Finish segment. At 15:08/mi across a course that tops out near 8,820 feet, that's a controlled, purposeful effort through genuinely thin air.
Right behind her, Shawn Sekel was making an even bolder move. She began the race buried at 58th among women but clawed all the way to 34th by the finish, posting the 18th-fastest women's split on that same closing segment — faster than Plew-Hearne's on that stretch. It was a classic catch-up: Sekel ran the final leg harder, but Plew-Hearne had built enough of a cushion that 62 seconds was the irreducible gap at the line.
McMahan's story ran in the opposite direction. She held a strong early position — 27th among women through the Snow King–to–KT 22 segment, where she posted the 26th-fastest women's split — but the back half of the course cost her. She slipped to 44th among women by the finish, though her 2:55:05 still secured 3rd in F50-59 with nearly three minutes of daylight over Anderson in 4th.
Danelle Hall (5th, 3:07:33) rounded out the top five, while the field stretched deep through the afternoon — Rebecca Clifton (6th, 3:27:48), Rhonda Beadell (7th, 3:34:10), and Laura Grunbaum (8th, 3:35:53) all finishing within nine minutes of each other. Robin Legat closed out the listed finishers in 20th at 4:09:52, with 11 more completing the course behind her.
AI recap · generated from official results
