M70-74: Ben Sundey Owns Rocket City in the Cold

• Ben Sundey won the M70-74 group in 2:06:57 (9:41/mi), finishing more than 13 minutes clear of runner-up Thomas Kuhn.
• Positions 3 through 6 were packed into just under 5 minutes — Henry Thomson (2:29:27), Ekkehard Bonatz (2:31:45), Rick Stockton (2:33:34), and David Malick (2:34:21).
• A notable gap separated the top six from the final three: Ronald Reid (3:32:21), John Wagoner (3:33:22), and Clifton Cartwright (3:52:34) each finished nearly an hour behind the leaders.
• All nine men ran through 29°F temperatures and a 16 mph wind — conditions that made every minute earned that much harder.

Nine men aged 70 to 73 lined up in Huntsville on a frigid December morning, and Ben Sundey, 71, made it look like a different race entirely. His 9:41-per-mile pace held firm through the back half — he picked up places among the men as the race wore on, moving from 329th to 304th in the men's field between the 6.8-mile mark and the finish — a sign he was running down competitors, not fading away from them. The 13-minute margin over Thomas Kuhn was decisive from the start.

Kuhn, 73, making the trip from Marana, Arizona, was a clear second at 2:20:26, also finishing strongly with a strong second-half surge that moved him from 465th to 419th in the men's field over the final stretch. Behind him, the battle for the remaining podium spot was anything but settled early. Henry Thomson, a Huntsville local, held off fellow Alabaman Ekkehard Bonatz of Birmingham by just over two minutes (2:29:27 to 2:31:45), with Rick Stockton and David Malick — both also from Alabama — completing a remarkably tight cluster across places 3 through 6.

The final three finishers — Reid, Wagoner, and Cartwright — ran their own race entirely, separated from the front pack by nearly an hour and spread across roughly 20 minutes among themselves. Cartwright's 3:52:34 at 17:44 per mile to close out the M70-74 field was a genuine act of persistence in biting cold. On a day when the wind chill made every mile feel longer, all nine finishing was the baseline achievement — Sundey just happened to make it look effortless.