San Francisco Marathon M65-69: Lambert Runs Down the Field

• Martin Lambert, 69, wins in 3:37:43 (8:18/mi), the fastest among 42 finishers in M65-69 — a commanding 16:38 gap over runner-up Jonathan Mayes.
• Lambert's finishing kick was real: he posted the 406th-fastest split among women on the 25 Miles→Finish segment, a measure of how hard he was still pressing in the closing miles.
• Groblewski fades, Tam holds on: Edward Groblewski and Vennie Tam both crossed in 3:56:33 — with the places decided by timing finer than the clock shows — but they got there very differently.
• The podium spans just 1:45: Mayes (3:54:21), Lee (3:55:28), Groblewski (3:56:33), and Tam (3:56:33) all finished within that window, making for one of the tightest clusters of the morning.

Martin Lambert came to San Francisco to race, not just finish. The 69-year-old from Calgary moved steadily through the men's field all day — tracking from well outside the top 1,000 men at the early checkpoints all the way up to 698th among men by mile 25 — and then kept pushing on the final stretch to the finish. That closing segment was his best relative effort of the race. At 8:18/mi, he was running at a pace the rest of M65-69 simply couldn't match, and the 16:38 margin he built over Jonathan Mayes reflects just how complete a performance it was.

Behind Lambert, the battle for the podium was genuinely gripping. Mayes, the local San Francisco runner, finished 2nd in 3:54:21 at 8:56/mi. Jung Ki Lee from Chino was right behind in 3:55:28 at 8:59/mi — a catch-up story in its own right, as Lee ran a faster closing pace than Mayes to close the gap between them to just 67 seconds. Then came the most dramatic subplot of the race: Edward Groblewski and Vennie Tam both clocked 3:56:33, with Groblewski edging 4th on the finer timing. Groblewski had been running inside the top 500 men early on, but his gender-place progression tells the story — he drifted from 366th among men near the start all the way back to 1,406th by mile 25, a significant fade. Tam, by contrast, was never near the front but ran his own steady race from back in the field.

Fu-Shin Yu rounded out the top six in 4:06:14 (9:23/mi), with Tim Fowler (4:21:03), Edgardo Villagomez (4:22:02), and Scott Dawson (4:23:17) filling 7th through 9th in a tight cluster. David Ching finished 10th in 4:30:53. The cool, humid San Francisco morning — 56°F and 93% humidity — suited the long-haul effort, and Lambert made the most of every mile of it.