M35-39 at CIM 2023: Beyer Runs Away with the Age Group Crown

• Chad Beyer won the M35-39 group in 2:16:41 (5:13/mi), finishing 14th among men overall — a margin of 3:27 over runner-up Jason Karbelk.
• Adam Bohach posted the 16th-fastest men's split on the 5K→10K segment and rocketed to 20th among men at the halfway mark, before fading to 3rd in 2:20:43 — the race's most dramatic arc in the top five.
• Mark Klassen ran the opposite story: 94th among men at the halfway point, he charged through the back half with the 47th-fastest men's split on the 35K→40K segment to claim 5th in 2:23:22.
• Places 6 through 10 were separated by just 10 seconds (2:23:44 to 2:24:39), making that stretch the tightest cluster of the entire top ten.

---

Chad Beyer's 2:16:41 was simply in a different class. Running 5:13 per mile through a mild Sacramento morning — 63°F, a light 4 mph breeze, overcast skies — the 37-year-old from Tempe moved from 43rd to 14th among men over the course of the race, a steady, relentless climb through the field. He didn't blow up early; he built. By 40K he was locked in, and his 40K-to-finish segment ranked 11th among men in the entire field. That's not survival — that's racing.

Behind him, the podium told two very different stories. Jason Karbelk (2:20:08) ran a controlled first half — 18th-fastest men's split to the halfway mark — and held his position all the way home for a clear second. Adam Bohach, meanwhile, went out hard with the 16th-fastest men's split on the 5K→10K segment and was sitting 20th among men at halfway. The back half cost him, and he slipped to 56th among men by the finish — but he held on for 3rd in 2:20:43, just 35 seconds behind Karbelk.

Matthew Hanson (4th, 2:22:57) and Mark Klassen (5th, 2:23:22) round out the podium story with contrasting approaches. Hanson faded from 30th among men early to 83rd at the finish; Klassen did the opposite, climbing from outside the top 200 among men to 94th with a strong late surge. Neither strategy quite cracked the podium, but Klassen's closing kick — 47th-fastest men's split from 35K to 40K — came closest to turning the tide.

The depth of the M35-39 group at CIM 2023 was real: 864 finishers, and places 6 through 10 compressed into a 10-second window between 2:23:44 and 2:24:39. Kevin Collington, Matthew Kruger, Aiman Scullion, Jon Pierce, and Jason Parks were essentially racing in a pack to the line, separated by fractions of effort over 26.2 miles.