New Records Set at Ninth Annual Turkey Trot

By STEVE GALLUZZO | Sports Editor

Almost 1,500 runners woke up early Thanksgiving morning, November 23, to participate in the ninth annual Pacific Palisades Turkey Trot (Powered by Exela), which started on the track and ended on the football field at Palisades Charter High School.

The 5K field included 1,262 runners (604 male, 658 female) with an average time of 40 minutes, 49 seconds. An additional 200 runners (105 male, 95 female) registered for the 10K with an average time of 58:20.

After entertaining the runners and spectators alike last fall, lifelong Palisadian Sam Laganà was invited back as the emcee, and the 2023 Beach Volleyball Hall of Fame inductee and LA Rams stadium voice introduced Annabelle Grandy to sing the national anthem. A freshman neuroscience major at Colgate College in Hamilton, New York, who went to Paul Revere Charter Middle School and graduated from Viewpoint in Calabasas, Grandy succeeded 2022 anthem singer Coco Kennedy, a Corpus Christi School and Marymount High alum who now attends the University of Texas.

Race founder David Houston wore his customary turkey outfit and rode ahead of the pack on his scooter to show the way to rookie runners unfamiliar with the route.

Luke Zanuck shattered the 5K record, completing the 3.1-mile course through the El Medio Bluffs in 15:36. Brentwood resident Will Sheehy set the previous mark (16:27) last year, three seconds faster than the 16:30 run by Ramin Razavi in 2016 and tied three years later by repeat winner Thomas Fitzpatrick.

Zanuck is a sophomore on the track team at Williams College in Massachusetts and achieved a season-best 25:56.2 in the 8K at the Little Three Championship September 16 in Connecticut. He ran cross country and track at Windward School in Mar Vista, and had run the Turkey Trot twice previously—in 2019 pre-COVID and last year when he finished fourth in 16:47.

“I wasn’t expecting to set the record, I really just wanted to do better than last year,” Zanuck said. “I dropped well over one minute from my time last year when I was 20 seconds behind the winner. I’d say anywhere from a mile to 5K is my ideal distance.”

The second time was the charm for Daniela Quintero, who was the women’s 5K winner in 19:14—a 35-second improvement over her time last fall when she was third among females behind Georgia McCorkle (19:07) and Christine Colby. She was 12th overall.

A Los Feliz resident and sophomore at Columbia University in New York City, where she is on the track team while majoring in computer science, Quintero was a three-sport star (cross country, soccer and track) at Harvard-Westlake High from 2018-22. As a freshman at Harvard-Westlake, Quintero won the Division 4 girls title at the CIF Southern Section Championships in Riverside to become the first Wolverines female since Palisadian Cami Chapus in 2011 to win a section crown.

Five-time champion Tania Fischer, a Jane’s Elite runner who coaches cross country and track at Santa Monica High School, set the Palisades Turkey Trot 5K women’s record in 2014 with a time of 18:47. Three years later she was not only first among women but beat all of the men too.

Coming in second was Ava Baak, who graduated from Pali High in the spring after winning the Post Cup Award as the school’s outstanding senior athlete. She is enjoying her freshman year at the University of Michigan and was also second at her other hometown holiday race, the Palisades Will Rogers 5K on the Fourth of July.

“I like seeing all my high school friends and former cross country teammates,” said Baak, who clocked 18:12 after an 18:51 effort in the Will Rogers Run four and a half months earlier. “I run club at Michigan and run with the team at 4 p.m. everyday. I’m taking five classes, so the workload is heavy.”

Thirteen-year-old Heleena Barnett, an eighth-grader at Paul Revere, was first in the female 13-15 age group in 21:56 after winning the 10-12 category in 21:32 last year.

The 10K champion Jonathan Wilson surprised even himself by finishing the 6.2-mile trek to the bottom of Temescal Canyon and back in 37:20, well off the record pace of 32:27 set by former Indiana University cyclist Craig Taylor of Redondo Beach in 2019, but much better than his sixth-place time in the 41:30 range last year.

A 2018 graduate of Stanford University who works in the engineering field and hails from Oklahoma, Wilson was in town to visit friends and family of his wife, who grew up locally and whose cousin, Alex, wrestles for the Pali High team.

“The 5K people pushed me, I was trying to keep up with them but when one of them said ‘one more mile to go,’ I knew there was something wrong because I wasn’t even at the halfway point [in the 10K],” said the 27-year-old from Sunnyvale, who said this was his third run this year but he is by no means a “career” runner. “I thought maybe I’d get top 10 but my time is better than I expected. It’s a good course and there are some beautiful views along the way.”

The women’s 10K champion in record time (38:01) was 43-year-old Lesley Paterson, a Scottish triathlete, author, screenwriter and film producer who three times won the XTERRA Triathlon World Championships (2011, 2012 and 2018) and won the World Triathlon Cross Championships in 2012 and 2018.

Paterson broke the previous 10K standard of 40:16 set in 2018 by Chloe Maleski, at the time a graduate student at Pepperdine and former distance runner at Duke.

Karla Khalifa of San Diego, was second in 38:49 and also bettered Maleski’s record. At age 39, Khalifa completed the Leprechaun Run in 17:39 to win her age group.

Paterson is also a triathlete coach and wrote a book titled “The Brave Athlete” with her husband that was published in June and focuses on training the athlete’s brain. She co-wrote a screenplay based on the 1928 World War I novel “All Quiet on the Western Front,” for which she took home the 2022 BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay.

Other 10K runners included former Pali High cross country and track team member Sarah Bentley, now a student at MIT, and ex-Dolphin baseball brothers Jon and Jed Moscot.