Rocket City 10K — F35-39: Smart Runs Away With It

• Molly Smart won the F35-39 age group in 50:01 (8:03/mi) — finishing more than four minutes clear of second place.
• The gap from 2nd to 3rd was just 1:08, with Rachel Evans (54:09) and Tausha Knight (55:17) separated by barely a mile's worth of effort.
• Places 3 through 5 were packed into less than two minutes: Knight (55:17), Amanda Yarges (55:49), and Jess Glass (57:09).
• The F35-39 field of 20 spanned nearly 47 minutes from front to back — Smart's 50:01 to Chelsea Crawshaw's 1:36:53.

Conditions at Rocket City on December 9th were anything but ideal for fast running — 70°F with 76% humidity and a 17 mph wind made it feel more like a summer slog than a winter race day. That makes Molly Smart's performance all the more striking. The 36-year-old from Dunedin, Florida, ran 8:03 per mile to win the F35-39 age group outright, and she did it by a margin that turned a competitive race into a solo time trial. Four minutes and eight seconds separated her from runner-up Rachel Evans — a gap that, at this pace, represents more than half a mile of daylight.

Evans, a local from Meridianville, held second in 54:09, while Tausha Knight of Flintville, Tennessee, pushed hard to claim the final podium spot in 55:17. Right behind them, the race got genuinely tight: Amanda Yarges (55:49) and Jess Glass (57:09) rounded out the top five within a two-minute window, making positions 3 through 5 the most contested stretch of the entire field. In tough conditions, any of those three could have swapped spots on a different day.

Further back, Hanna Manning (59:01) and Desiree Dollahite (1:00:46) were the last two finishers under the 61-minute mark, with the rest of the 20-woman field spread across the next 35 minutes. It was Smart's race from the gun, but the battle for the podium — and the cluster just behind it — gave the F35-39 age group plenty of its own drama to savor.