Broken Arrow Ascent M60-69: Houghton Tops the Mountain at 67

• Rob Houghton, 67, wins in 1:04:14 (29:33/mi avg) — the fastest in the M60-69 field by 2:25 over Theo Wirth's 1:06:39.
• Tight battle for 3rd and 4th: David Long (1:11:12) and Gary Deacon (1:11:21) were separated by just nine seconds — but Deacon faded on the Snow King→Finish segment while Long held on.
• A California-heavy field: 15 of the 20 named finishers hail from California, with the course running at elevations up to nearly 8,000 feet above Palisades Tahoe on a sweltering 91°F day.
• Phil Adrian, 69, finishes 14th in 1:30:36 — the eldest among the named finishers, logging 41:40/mi across the ascent.

Rob Houghton made a statement from the gun. The 67-year-old from Murphys, CA climbed from 138th to 108th among men on the Snow King→Finish segment — the strongest move of anyone in the top five — and crossed in 1:04:14 to claim the M60-69 win. On a day with temperatures hitting 91°F and thin air hovering around 7,000 feet, that kind of sustained push demands real respect. Theo Wirth, 60, of Roseville kept it honest in 1:06:39, improving from 134th to 125th among men on that same closing stretch, but couldn't close the 2:25 gap Houghton had built.

The race for third was the day's sharpest subplot. David Long (Los Osos, CA) and Gary Deacon (Sonora, CA) arrived at the Snow King checkpoint separated by just seconds, but they diverged sharply from there. Long ran the 150th-fastest men's split on that closing segment; Deacon managed only the 157th-fastest and slipped from 135th to 155th among men — fading when it mattered most. The nine-second gap at the line, 1:11:12 to 1:11:21, tells the story of a race decided on that final climb.

Behind the podium, Glenn Ross (Paso Robles, CA) rounded out the top five in 1:13:06, with David Montague and Jim Correll finishing back-to-back in 1:16:40 and 1:16:41 — a single-second split after more than 76 minutes of racing. The field spread wide from there, with Timothy Bond (2:08:07) and Jon Burgasser (2:08:52) completing the named finishers in just over two hours on a brutally hot afternoon at altitude.