Long Beach Half Marathon F55-59: Powell dominates as SoCal's finest go the distance

• Kelly Powell (San Diego) won the F55-59 race in 1:37:23 (7:26/mi), finishing more than 12 minutes clear of second place in a 192-runner field.
• Kyoko Furukawa (Los Angeles) took second in 1:49:31, with Charlene Trinh (Huntington Beach) third in 1:51:48 — a gap of just 2:17 between them.
• The podium through fifth was tightly contested: positions 3–5 spanned only 3:09, from Trinh's 1:51:48 to Anna Frescas Chung's 1:54:57.
• Costanza Genoese Zerbi (4th, 1:53:38) and Frescas Chung (5th, 1:54:57) both faded through the second half, each dropping steadily in the women's field from the midpoint onward.

Kelly Powell simply ran a different race than everyone else in the F55-59 field. Starting at a 7:26/mi average, she moved from 63rd among women at the first checkpoint all the way up to 53rd by the finish — still climbing while others were fading. Her closing split from 10.8 miles to the line ranked 48th-fastest among all women in the race, a genuine surge to close things out. The 12-minute, 8-second gap she put between herself and Furukawa was not a close contest; it was a statement.

Behind Powell, the real racing happened between second and fifth. Furukawa (1:49:31) ran a measured first half but faded on the 5.5M–10.8M segment, dropping from 180th among women to 201st — her second-place finish held because the women chasing her faded too. Trinh, by contrast, ran the second half as her strongest segment, posting the 251st-fastest second-half split among women to lock up third in 1:51:48. Genoese Zerbi and Frescas Chung both tracked a similar story: strong early positioning that eroded as the miles added up, finishing fourth (1:53:38) and fifth (1:54:57) respectively.

Further back, the 6th-through-8th spots were packed into just 25 seconds — Anne Kinney (1:55:09), Kim Ho (1:55:29), and Roxana Masia (1:55:34) crossing in a tight cluster. Tanya Buchanan of Covina, the oldest finisher in the top ten at 59, rounded out the top nine in 1:57:58, holding off Suzanne Mentz's 1:59:23 in tenth. With 192 women finishing across the F55-59 field on a cool, clear Long Beach morning, the depth of the group made Powell's wire-to-wire dominance all the more striking.