F18-20 Half Marathon: Aaen dominates a cold, wet Napa morning

• Maya Aaen won the F18-20 race in 1:33:53 (7:10/mi), climbing to 52nd among women at the halfway point before crossing the line 32 minutes and 45 seconds ahead of the next finisher.
• Carolina Rodrigues Carvalho ran the second half of the course on a strong note — her 6.9M→Finish split ranked 392nd among women — finishing 2nd in 2:06:38 (9:40/mi).
• Sydney Myers rounded out the three-woman field in 2:23:54 (10:59/mi), completing the course despite a back-half fade that dropped her to 751st among women by the finish.

Three runners, 40 degrees, and a steady Napa drizzle — that was the F18-20 half marathon in 2024. Maya Aaen, 18, from just down the road in Napa, made it look clean from the gun. She moved from 55th to 52nd among women through the first half of the race and held her position through to the tape, posting a 7:10/mi average that put her 49th-fastest among all women on the 6.9M-to-finish stretch. In a small field, she was in a category of her own.

The real story in the back half was Carolina Rodrigues Carvalho's surge. The 20-year-old from Stanford came through the first half in the mid-600s among women, but her closing split — 392nd-fastest among women on that final stretch — represented a meaningful jump through the field, pulling her from 566th to 474th among women by the finish. She crossed in 2:06:38 at a 9:40/mi pace, a full 32:45 behind Aaen but a clear and comfortable 17:16 ahead of third.

Sydney Myers, 19, from Herriman, Utah, finished in 2:23:54 at 10:59/mi to claim third. Her mid-race split on the 3.1M-to-6.9M segment ranked 732nd among women, and her position among the women's field slipped slightly in the back half — but she got it done on a tough day for racing. Three finishers, three different stories, all of them out there in the rain.