SF Marathon Half: Tseng dominates M50-54 with a 1:31:40 clinic

• Yu-Ping Tseng won M50-54 in 1:31:40 (6:60/mi) — a 7-minute gap over 2nd place Bill Garrett (1:38:45).
• Qingyu Song and Keith Nykamp finished 3rd and 4th separated by just 4 seconds (1:40:27 vs. 1:40:31), with Nykamp posting the 133rd-fastest final-mile split to Song's 138th — Song held on by the slimmest of margins.
• Robert Choy ran the 69th-fastest split among women on the 8M→9.6M segment, the strongest mid-race move in the top five.
• Places 6–8 — Jason Moy (1:44:25), Trung Nguyen (1:44:41), and Timothy Weaver (1:44:49) — were separated by just 24 seconds across three finishers.

Yu-Ping Tseng, 52, from Burlingame, turned this into a one-man show. His 1:31:40 at a 6:60/mi clip was simply in a different class from the rest of M50-54 — the 7-minute margin over runner-up Bill Garrett is the kind of gap that makes a leaderboard look like two separate races. Tseng's checkpoint progression told the same story: he climbed steadily through the women's field from 101st to as high as 59th, and his 30th-fastest split among women on the 9.6M→10.5M stretch confirmed he was still pushing hard well past the halfway mark. In 59°F and a stiff 14 mph wind off the Bay, that kind of sustained pace is no small feat.

Garrett, 50, out of Davenport, Iowa, secured 2nd in 1:38:45 (7:32/mi) but faded through the second half — his gender-place tracking drifted from 86th early to 126th at the finish, a sign the back miles cost him. Behind him, the race for 3rd was a genuine battle. Qingyu Song and Keith Nykamp, both 50 and from the East Bay, ran nearly identical back halves — Song posting the 138th-fastest, Nykamp the 133rd-fastest 12M→Finish split among women — yet Song crossed in 1:40:27 to Nykamp's 1:40:31, four seconds the difference after 13.1 miles.

Further down, the 6th-through-8th cluster of Moy, Nguyen, and Weaver packed into a 24-second window between 1:44:25 and 1:44:49 — a tight little battle that likely came down to the final mile. Yuan Gu and Todd Wang mirrored that pattern at 16th and 17th, finishing within 3 seconds of each other at 1:53:53 and 1:53:56. In a 196-finisher M50-54 field with competition stretching well into the 2-hour range, the depth was real — and Tseng ran away from all of it.