Napa Valley Marathon F21-24: Shults Sets the Standard

• Mikayla Shults won the F21-24 race in 3:09:54 (7:15/mi), finishing roughly 9:30 clear of 2nd place.
• Aly Anixter ran the second-fastest women's half from 13.1 to the finish — the 29th-fastest second-half split among all women — to climb from 39th to 29th in the women's field and lock up 2nd in 3:19:27.
• Cayla Davis posted the 27th-fastest women's split on the 13.1M–20M stretch, surging from 78th to 39th among women en route to 3rd in 3:22:51.
• Five finishers broke 3:30, and 20 named finishers completed the course — with 29 more rounding out a 49-strong F21-24 field.

Mikayla Shults, 23, from Reno, ran the most controlled race at the front of the F21-24 field. Her 7:15/mi average held steady enough to keep her in the vicinity of 19th–21st among all women throughout, and she delivered the 18th-fastest women's split on the 10K-to-half stretch — a mid-race move that signaled she had the legs to hold on. She crossed in 3:09:54, nearly ten minutes ahead of the next F21-24 finisher. That's not a close race at the top; that's a wire-to-wire statement.

The real drama unfolded behind her. Aly Anixter, 24, from Granite Bay, was a climber — moving from 39th to 29th among women over the back half, finishing 2nd in the F21-24 field in 3:19:27 at 7:36/mi. Cayla Davis, 24, from San Francisco, was even more aggressive in the middle miles: she entered the halfway point 78th among women and exited the 13.1–20M segment 39th, ultimately finishing 3rd in 3:22:51 (7:44/mi). Both were catch-up stories, running faster than the women ahead of them on those segments — but Shults was never the one being caught.

Ariana Cepulis (4th, 3:26:25) and Athena Pyros (5th, 3:29:09) both made strong late moves, each posting top-50 women's splits on the 20M-to-finish stretch — Cepulis at 7:52/mi and Pyros at 7:59/mi — with Hana Declerck rounding out the sub-3:30 group just 39 seconds behind in 6th at 3:29:48. A crisp 42-degree morning in Napa gave the whole field ideal conditions, and the F21-24 group made the most of it.