Women's Race: Meseret Belete Tola Edges Out a Thriller at the Front

• Tola wins in 1:09:35 (5:18/mi), posting the fastest women's split from 5K to 8K and holding the lead wire-to-wire across 4,721 finishers.
• Two seconds separated the top two: Mercy Lagat crossed in 1:09:37 — a stunning improvement from her 9th-place, 1:18:04 finish at this same race in 2024.
• Maggie Montoya (1:09:52) moved from 4th to 3rd on the 5K–8K stretch with the third-fastest women's split on that segment, claiming the final podium spot by 16 seconds.
• Joyline Chemutai, the 2024 women's champion here (1:11:44), returned to finish 4th in 1:11:28 — actually faster than her title-winning time a year ago, but this year's front-loaded field left her off the podium.

Meseret Belete Tola, 25, of West Chester, OH, was never threatened at the front. She held first place at every checkpoint and delivered her decisive blow on the 5K-to-8K segment, where she clocked the fastest women's split of the race. Her 5:18/mi average held firm to the tape, and a 1:09:35 finish left the field chasing her shadow.

Right behind her, Mercy Lagat made the most dramatic statement of the day. Twelve months ago she was 9th here in 1:18:04; on Sunday she crossed in 1:09:37, lopping nearly nine minutes off her time at this race. She owned the fastest women's split from 8K to 10K — a stretch where she clearly turned the screws — and finished just two seconds shy of the win. The gap at the line was razor-thin; the gap in improvement was anything but.

Montoya's race was defined by movement. She sat 4th through the opening 5K, then ran the third-fastest women's split on the 5K–8K segment to vault onto the podium, where she stayed through the finish in 1:09:52. Behind her, Chemutai (1:11:28) and Yuka Ando (1:12:21) rounded out the top five, with Ando posting the fourth-fastest women's split from 15K to the finish to edge Molly Bookmyer (1:12:25) by four seconds for fifth. Maria Lindberg, 40, of Elmhurst, claimed 9th in 1:15:33 — the top finish among the 40-and-over women in the listed results.