Men's Half Marathon: Kowada closes with a hammer to claim San Francisco

• Hibiki Kowada, 1:16:51 (5:52/mi): won the men's race after surging from 6th to 1st in the final stretch — and backed it up having already won the Saturday 5K earlier in the weekend.
• Zac Grissom, 1:17:19: runner-up by 28 seconds, climbing from 8th at the penultimate checkpoint to 2nd at the line with a strong late charge.
• Ryan Chen, 1:18:12: 18 years old, 3rd place — ran the 2nd-fastest 10M→10.5M split among the men to reclaim a podium spot he'd nearly surrendered mid-race.
• Closest battle below the podium: Andrew Kohn (4th, 1:20:30) and Sarung Tripathi (5th, 1:20:50) were separated by just 20 seconds across 13.1 miles.

The headline story in the men's field of 3,619 is Hibiki Kowada's stunning finishing kick. Running at a 5:52/mi clip, the 29-year-old from Shibuya spent most of the race hovering around 6th place — dipping as far back as 6th at multiple checkpoints — before detonating on the 10M→10.5M segment, where he posted the fastest split of any man in the field. He hit the line in 1:16:51, breaking the previous course record set by Christopher Guerrero (1:18:57, 2022) by over two minutes. What makes it even more remarkable: Kowada had already raced — and won — the Saturday 5K the day prior. Winning two races at the same event is one of the better stories the San Francisco Marathon has seen in recent editions.

Grissom had a race of his own. The 25-year-old San Franciscan ran the 5th-fastest 2M→4M split among the men and kept himself in contention throughout, but it was his late surge — moving from 8th to 2nd in the final miles — that earned him the runner-up spot at 1:17:19. He closed harder than nearly anyone, just not quite hard enough to catch Kowada's finishing blitz.

Ryan Chen, 18, out of Sunnyvale, deserves a long look. He ran with the leaders early (3rd through the first checkpoint), faded to 9th mid-race, then clawed back to 3rd with the 2nd-fastest 10M→10.5M split in the men's field — the same segment where Kowada was flying. At 1:18:12 and 5:58/mi, Chen's podium finish is a serious statement for a teenager on a hilly San Francisco course in 14 mph wind.

Behind the top three, the 4th-through-12th group was remarkably compressed. Kohn (4th, 1:20:30) and Tripathi (5th, 1:20:50) led a pack that included Marcello Rossi (6th, 1:22:19), 17-year-old Colton Ryssemus (7th, 1:22:25), and Li Chieh Hsu (8th, 1:22:51) — with four more men between 1:22:57 and 1:23:01. That's a lot of racing packed into a very narrow window, and it made for a genuinely entertaining mid-pack battle on a cool, breezy morning by the Bay.