Men's 10K: Ben Deeter Owns Memphis from Gun to Tape

• Ben Deeter wins in 35:26 (5:42/mi), the fastest men's finish of the day — running wire-to-wire at the front and posting the fastest men's split on the 1.55M→2.5M stretch.
• Oliver Rigg (36:22) held 2nd the entire race, never yielding the position, while John Baltz (36:46) climbed from 5th to 3rd with the 4th-fastest men's split on that same segment.
• Francisco Abreu (36:56) and William Pressler (37:43) each moved up two spots in the final stretch — Abreu from 6th to 4th, Pressler from 8th to 5th — both running that middle segment faster than their early positioning suggested.
• 1,659 men finished the race on a frigid 33°F morning on the streets of Memphis, from B.B. King Blvd. to the finish at AutoZone Park.

Ben Deeter made this one look clean. The Memphis local led from start to finish, never ceding his top spot through any checkpoint, and backed it up with the fastest men's split on the 1.55M–2.5M segment. His 35:26 — a 5:42/mi clip in freezing temperatures — bettered the 2023 men's winning time of 38:10 and the 2022 mark of 36:01, putting this among the sharpest men's winning performances in recent editions of the race. Indianapolis's Oliver Rigg was equally locked in, sitting 2nd at every checkpoint and finishing in 36:22 (5:51/mi) — a 56-second gap to Deeter that never really narrowed.

The real action was behind them. John Baltz of Germantown started 5th, moved to 4th by mid-race, and closed 3rd in 36:46 — his 5:55/mi pace and the 4th-fastest split on that key middle segment doing the work. Francisco Abreu mirrored that trajectory, going from 6th to 4th in 36:56. Both men ran that 1.55M–2.5M stretch faster than the runners they passed, and the final order reflects it.

Further back, Seth Cooke (7th, 38:31), Aaron Camp (8th, 38:47), and Garrison Hickey (9th, 38:55) rounded out a tight cluster in the 38-minute range, while Collins McCleary (10th, 39:42) led a deeper pack through the 39s. All of it played out on a course that winds through the St. Jude campus — a route as meaningful as it is fast, benefiting St. Jude Children's Research Hospital through the largest single-day fundraiser in the organization's history.