Rocket City Half Marathon M25-29: Fajardo Strnad dominates in the cold

• Roberto Fajardo Strnad won the M25-29 group in 1:12:57 (5:34/mi), leading the men's field wire-to-wire and posting the 2nd-fastest closing split (6.8M to Finish) among all men.
• Rand Cochrane was a clear runner-up in 1:17:51 — nearly five minutes back, but strong enough to rank 8th among all men on that same closing stretch.
• Alex Baty and Joseph Angelillo ran within 72 seconds of each other for 3rd and 4th, clocking 1:24:34 and 1:25:46 respectively.
• Places 7–9 — Jason Westmoreland, Gabe Simpson, and Matisse Miller — finished in a tight 16-second window between 1:31:21 and 1:31:37.

With 29°F temperatures and a 16 mph wind cutting through Huntsville, Roberto Fajardo Strnad of Ooltewah, TN, made the conditions look almost irrelevant. He held 1st among the men from start to finish, and his 5:34/mi average tells the story plainly: this was a performance in a different gear from the rest of the M25-29 field. His closing half — the 2nd-fastest men's split from 6.8 miles to the finish — confirmed he wasn't just surviving the cold, he was racing through it.

Rand Cochrane (Winston-Salem, NC) was the clear second-best story, crossing in 1:17:51 and picking up a place in the men's standings over that same closing segment, where he ranked 8th among all men. Behind him, Alex Baty (Hoover, AL) and Hayden Maples (Cullman, AL) told opposite tales in the back half: Baty gained three places after 6.8 miles while Maples dropped six, sliding from 16th to 22nd in the men's field as the wind and cold took their toll.

The battle for 7th through 9th was the tightest of the day in this group — Westmoreland, Simpson, and Miller separated by just 16 seconds across 13.1 miles. In a 99-finisher M25-29 field braving genuine winter conditions, that kind of racing deserves its own mention.