Fort Ord 10K F70-79: Karen Park Leads Wire to Wire

• Karen Park, 72, wins the F70-79 age group in 1:25:40 — a 13:47/mi average that put clear daylight between her and the field.
• Gallena Quinalty, 76, finishes 2nd in 1:47:37, running the Skyline→Finish segment faster than Harumi Nishijima to hold her position.
• Harumi Nishijima, 70, rounds out the podium in 1:58:03 — the youngest of the three, but third across the line.
• Three finishers, three different cities up and down California — King City, Long Beach, and Torrance all represented on the F70-79 podium.

Karen Park owned this race from start to finish. Running a 13:47/mi average through the trails of Fort Ord, she built a lead that Gallena Quinalty and Harumi Nishijima simply couldn't answer, finishing in 1:25:40 — more than 21 minutes clear of second place. Park was moving through the women's field early, climbing from 45th to 58th among women by the final segment, a shift that reflects the natural compression of a race where she was already well ahead of her age-group rivals.

The battle for second played out on the Skyline→Finish stretch. Both Quinalty and Nishijima were running in the same neighborhood of the women's field through much of the race — Nishijima held 76th among women heading into that final segment while Quinalty sat at 80th — but it was Quinalty who ran the stronger closing leg. Her 78th-fastest women's split on Skyline→Finish edged Nishijima's 81st, and she came home in 1:47:37 to claim second. Nishijima, despite being the youngest of the three at 70, couldn't quite hold on, finishing in 1:58:03 for third.

On a breezy, humid February morning on the Monterey Peninsula, three women in their seventies put Fort Ord's trails to the test. Park's performance stood alone — but Quinalty's late surge to secure second, and Nishijima's 1:58 finish, made for a complete F70-79 podium worth celebrating.