Women's Half Marathon: Scarborough Leads Wire to Wire in Folsom

• Ariane Scarborough won the women's race in 1:30:04 (6:52/mi), holding 1st place from start to finish and posting the fastest women's split from Mile 4 to the finish.
• Erin Wachter ran the 2nd-fastest Mile 4→Finish split among women to move from 4th to 3rd, edging Kristen Bernard (4th, 1:33:02) and Erica Jennison (5th, 1:33:32) in a tight late-race shuffle.
• The podium was decided by just 2:09 across 3rd through 5th place — but the gap from Scarborough to runner-up Nicole Dillmann (1:32:00) was a commanding 1:56.
• Tatiana Leahey, 56, finished 10th in 1:40:38 (7:41/mi), the oldest athlete in the top 20 by a wide margin.

Under a cool, calm November morning in Folsom — 49°F with barely a breath of wind — Ariane Scarborough of Penn Valley ran a controlled, dominant race. She sat in 1st place among women from the opening miles and never relinquished it, finishing in 1:30:04 at a 6:52/mi average. Her most decisive statement came in the back half: she posted the fastest Mile 4-to-finish split among all 184 women, pulling steadily clear of a field that was very much alive behind her.

Nicole Dillmann (24, SF) held 2nd from early on and crossed in 1:32:00 — 7:01/mi — to lock up the runner-up spot. But the real drama unfolded just behind her. Erin Wachter of Folsom ran the 2nd-fastest Mile 4→Finish split in the women's field, climbing from 4th to 3rd and finishing in 1:32:13 at 7:02/mi. That's a meaningful catch-up — Wachter ran that stretch faster than both Kristen Bernard (3rd→4th, 1:33:02, 7:06/mi) and Erica Jennison (3rd→5th, 1:33:32, 7:08/mi), both of whom faded slightly in the second half. Bernard and Jennison had posted the 3rd- and 5th-fastest Mile 4→Finish splits respectively, so the podium battle was genuinely contested all the way in.

Jennifer Schmidt (14th, 1:48:18) is worth a nod as a returning face: she ran this same race in 2025, finishing 6th in 1:38:34. Today's result was slower by nearly ten minutes, but she crossed the line nonetheless. Tatiana Leahey, meanwhile, delivered one of the day's quieter standout performances — at 56, she ran 1:40:38 (7:41/mi) to finish 10th among 184 women, a result that speaks for itself.