M40-44 at CIM 2024: Simpson Dominates, Larson Surges Late

• Jason Simpson (Boulder, CO) won the M40-44 group in 2:24:45 — a 5:31/mi average — finishing nearly 3 minutes and 12 seconds clear of the field.
• Korey Larson claimed 2nd with a strong closing kick: he posted the 57th-fastest split in the field from 40K to the finish, moving from 87th to 87th among men overall but locking up the runner-up spot in M40-44.
• 14th and 15th in the group — John Damen and Pedro Aquino — finished in the same clock time of 2:35:21, with Damen edging Aquino by the slimmest of margins at the line.
• A deep field of 721 finishers in M40-44 made this one of the most competitive age groups on the course.

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Jason Simpson ran away from a stacked M40-44 field at the 2024 California International Marathon, crossing in 2:24:45 at a relentless 5:31/mi. He arrived in Sacramento from Boulder with legs clearly tuned for this course, and the data backs it up: his gender-place trajectory tells the story of a man who started conservatively and then simply refused to slow down, climbing from 66th among men at the 5K checkpoint all the way to 57th by the finish. That kind of progressive strength over 26.2 miles is rare.

Korey Larson of Norman, OK made the podium the hard way. He was 115th among men at the opening checkpoint, grinding steadily forward through the middle miles, and then uncorked one of the sharpest closing segments in the M40-44 group — his 40K-to-finish split ranked 57th in the entire men's field. He crossed in 2:27:57, a 5:39/mi average, to claim 2nd by a comfortable margin over Corey Baxter (2:30:14), who himself ran a strong 20K-to-half split ranked 92nd among men.

Tim Comay and Ben Keck — both age 40, both from the Bay Area and Northern California — traded positions through the middle of the race before Comay held on for 4th (2:30:48) and Keck settled for 5th (2:31:45). Behind them, the M40-44 group stayed remarkably tight: six runners from 6th through 11th finished within a 53-second window between 2:33:01 and 2:33:58, including Tesfaye Wosene (age 43, Temecula) and David Krall (age 44, Madison), the two oldest men in the top ten proving that the back half of the age band had plenty of fire left.