Rocket City Back Half: Michael Smith Dominates M60-64

• Michael Smith won the M60-64 group in 1:49:43 (8:22/mi), finishing more than 7 minutes clear of runner-up Buddy Smith.
• Buddy Smith edged Chuck Blevins by nearly 4 minutes for second, with Blevins and Roger Smalligan separated by just 28 seconds in a tight battle for the final podium spot.
• Ray Singer and Octavio Caviedes ran virtually identical races, Singer clocking 2:06:41 and Caviedes 2:06:43 — two seconds apart at 5th and 6th.
• The M60-64 field spread across a 1:02:20 window from first to 20th, reflecting a wide range of paces on a damp, humid December morning in Huntsville.

Michael Smith was simply in a different race from everyone else in the M60-64 group. His 8:22/mi average held up across the full 13.1 miles, and his finishing kick was no illusion — on the 10K-to-Finish stretch he posted the 39th-fastest split among the men, climbing from 45th to 41st in the men's field as others faded around him. At 63, he ran a time that would be impressive at any age on a morning that offered 98% humidity and little mercy.

Behind him, Buddy Smith (no relation, also 63) ran a composed 8:56/mi to hold second comfortably, while the real drama played out between Chuck Blevins and Roger Smalligan for third. Blevins, from McCalla, crossed in 2:00:53; Smalligan, racing on his home roads in Huntsville, came through in 2:01:21. Both men were moving through the men's field on that final stretch — Blevins climbing from 95th to 85th, Smalligan from 89th to 88th — but Blevins had just enough to hold the podium spot.

The fifth and sixth spots produced the afternoon's most dramatic near-miss. Ray Singer (Murfreesboro, TN) and Octavio Caviedes (Alabaster, AL) ran the back half in lockstep, finishing in 2:06:41 and 2:06:43 respectively — a two-second gap after more than two hours of racing. George Heath rounded out the top seven just 25 seconds further back, making it a genuinely competitive mid-pack cluster. Twenty-three men in all finished the M60-64 group on a heavy, overcast Sunday in Alabama, and the times they posted tell the story of a tough day run hard.