Men's Half Marathon: Schmiedeler Runs Away from a Fast Field

• Ted Schmiedeler won the men's race in 1:18:56 (6:01/mi), posting the fastest men's split from Mile 4 to the finish to seal a dominant victory.
• Mark Bancroft was the closest challenger at 1:19:17 — just 21 seconds back — with the second-fastest closing split among the men.
• Keith Bailey, 40, held off fellow 40-year-old Mario Garibaldi for the final podium spot: 1:21:12 to 1:22:40.
• Giovanni Flores, just 15 years old, cracked the top ten with a 1:28:27 — and Jacob Nur, 71, was still posting a 7:05/mi pace to finish 12th in 1:32:53.

A crisp 49°F morning in Folsom set the stage for fast running, and the men's field delivered. Ted Schmiedeler, 23, of Sacramento controlled the race from the front — he held the top spot from start to finish — and then turned the screws after Mile 4, running the fastest closing split among all 159 men to finish in 1:18:56. Mark Bancroft of Davis was right there through the early miles and answered with the second-fastest closing split himself, but couldn't close a 21-second gap, finishing in 1:19:17. At 6:01 and 6:03 per mile respectively, those are two genuinely different efforts — Schmiedeler simply had more in the tank when it mattered.

Behind the top two, the podium battle was a study in late-race movement. Keith Bailey (1:21:12) and Mario Garibaldi (1:22:40) — both 40 years old out of Fair Oaks and Carmichael — ran the third- and fourth-fastest closing splits in the men's field, with Garibaldi actually moving up from 5th to 4th after Mile 4. Bailey held firm for 3rd, but Garibaldi's surge was the most notable positional move of the race.

Jonathan Carter made it three 40-year-olds in the top five, finishing 5th in 1:24:50 — and he did it one minute faster than his 5th-place finish at this same race in 2025 (1:25:56), a tidy improvement on familiar ground. The mid-field had its own storylines: 15-year-old Giovanni Flores of Rancho Cordova ran a 6:45/mi pace to finish 9th in 1:28:27, while 71-year-old Jacob Nur of Elk Grove crossed 12th in 1:32:53 at 7:05/mi — two athletes at opposite ends of the age spectrum, both firmly in the top ten percent of a 159-man field.