San Francisco Half Marathon: Elizabeth Smith Rules the F60-64 Field

• Elizabeth Smith won the F60-64 race in 2:00:52 (9:13/mi), finishing more than four minutes clear of second place.
• Sheena Shi ran the strongest final stretch of the podium trio — her 227th-fastest women's split on the 10.9M→Finish segment outpaced both Smith (211th) and Liping Feng (275th) in that closing push, but she couldn't overcome the gap she'd built up earlier.
• Places 5 and 6 finished within 21 seconds of each other: Linda Siino in 2:17:33 and Rocio Malatesta in 2:17:54.
• The field spanned 79 minutes from first to last — Elizabeth Smith's 2:00:52 to Laura Nabity's 3:19:58 — across 18 finishers.

On a cool, damp San Francisco morning — 57°F and 91% humidity, with the city's signature fog hanging overhead — Elizabeth Smith of San Francisco made the F60-64 race her own from early on. Her gender place ticked from 254th at the first checkpoint to 237th by the finish, a steady, controlled climb through the women's field at 9:13/mi. Her winning margin over second-place Liping Feng was 4:26, a gap that tells the story clearly: Smith was in a different gear.

Feng (2:05:18, 9:33/mi) held second comfortably, but the real drama on the podium belonged to Sheena Shi. Running 9:42/mi for a 2:07:04 finish, Shi was back in the women's field at the first checkpoint — 558th among women — but she ran herself all the way up to 336th by the end. Her closing segment from 10.9 miles to the finish was the fastest of the top three, and she earned third place by 1:46 over Karen Clark.

Clark (2:12:51, 10:08/mi) was a solid fourth, while the battle for fifth was tight: Linda Siino (2:17:33) and Rocio Malatesta (2:17:54) were separated by just 21 seconds after more than two hours of racing. Behind them, seven finishers clustered between 2:29 and 2:37 — Laura Lalonde (2:29:15) through Penny Schmeidler (2:37:39) — making the middle of the field one of the day's more competitive stretches.

Laura Nabity rounded out the 18-woman field in 3:19:58 (15:15/mi), completing a race that tested every finisher across San Francisco's demanding terrain.