Rocket City Marathon F30-34: Jampel runs away with it in the cold

• Sarah Jampel wins the F30-34 age group in 3:08:43 (7:12/mi), finishing 10th among all women — the class of the field from start to finish.
• 5:35 separates 2nd through 5th place — Iwasaki (3:14:18), Ridley (3:17:47), Lofgren (3:17:54), and Queen (3:20:11) battled hard for the remaining podium spots.
• Ridley and Lofgren finished just 7 seconds apart (3:17:47 vs. 3:17:54), with Ridley holding 3rd — both ran the 15th- and 16th-fastest women's splits from 10K to the half.
• Eryn Queen faded from 11th among women at the start to 18th by the finish, giving up ground in the second half after a strong early position.

Twenty-nine degrees and a 16 mph wind greeted the 72 women of the F30-34 age group on the streets of Huntsville, and Sarah Jampel from East Thetford, Vermont treated it like a training run. She moved from 12th among women at the 10K to 10th by the finish, running a composed 7:12/mi average and posting the 10th-fastest women's split on the final stretch from mile 20 to the finish — a strong close when others were fading. She crossed in 3:08:43, more than five and a half minutes clear of second place.

Behind her, the race for 2nd through 5th was a genuine fight. Kathryn Iwasaki of Atlanta ran the 16th-fastest women's split from mile 20 to the finish and climbed from 17th among women at the 10K all the way to 13th by the line, claiming 2nd in 3:14:18. Jessica Ridley and Rebekah Lofgren — both also from the Atlanta area — ran nearly the entire race in tandem, Ridley posting the 15th-fastest women's 10K-to-half split and Lofgren the 16th, before Ridley edged ahead 3rd in 3:17:47 to Lofgren's 3:17:54.

The most notable reversal belonged to Eryn Queen of Chattanooga, who sat 11th among women through the early miles but slipped to 18th by the finish, crossing in 3:20:11. She still claimed 5th in the age group, but the second half of the race clearly took its toll. Mary Helen Saunders-Otte, running in her home territory of Owens Cross Roads, Alabama, took 6th in 3:27:31, followed by Nina Sillivant of Huntsville in 7th at 3:29:03 — a local showing on a brutally cold morning.