Monta Vista’s track season opened in fine fashion at the Willow Glen Invitational on Saturday, March 2. This meet was a great start for the year with lots of good performances by our athletes!
Emilio Torres-Gonzalez was the first athlete to compete for Monta Vista this season, and Emilio started us off well. In his first injury-free race in almost a year, Emilio executed superb strategy, starting off near the middle of the pack and steadily moving up; Emilio’s 5-6-7 laps were actually faster than his 2-3-4 laps! Accelerating in a distance race is hard thing to do, and can be demoralizing to competitors who are starting to fade in the middle of their race. Emilio finished in 10:30.55, an 8 second PR, and he ended up in fourth place, taking home a medal–not the first medal for MV athletes today! Emilio has shown a lot of patience and discipline over the last year as he came back from a series of injuries; not many high school athletes display the persistence in the face of adversity that Emilio has done. Let’s see if Emilio’s opening performance sets the tone for all of us this season!
The next three Monta Vista athletes to start also nabbed medals! Freshman Giselle Kaneda, in her first high school race, brought home a 3rd place medal in the Varsity Girls’ 100m hurdles with a 17.79! Giselle earned her medal from the 2nd of five heats, not easy to do–and she was the only freshman in the top 5. Maddie Yip and Bridget Gottlieb went 3-4 in the Varsity Girls’ 3200m to both earn medals–Bridget’s time was an incredible 34 second PR!
Rounding out the MV medal haul were Jenny Xu with a second place in the VG1600, and Rohan Choudhury with a 3rd place finish in the FSB1600. Both Jenny and Rohan ran very good races and looked strong at the finish. Everyone is very excited about Jenny and Rohan’s season openers!
MV’s results included many more personal bests. Sophomore Rhea Choudhury improved her triple jump PR by almost 2′, and William Sheu also had a TJ PR. Salvador Torres-Gonzalez had a 7 second PR in the 1600m; his previous PR was also set at Willow Glen, so Salvador clearly feels comfortable at his coach’s old track! John Hsiao improved his 1600m time by more than 20 seconds, and Anand Rao was under five minutes for the first time–one of his goals for the season, achieved in the first meet of the year!
Many other solid marks were posted, and if our athletes continue to build on their current fitness and race-readiness, we will see some spectacular competitions over the next eight weeks! We should remember that the season-opener is always a rust-buster; if the first race is tough, that should not be a big deal, and if the rust-buster is good…well, that is gravy!
Congratulations to all of you!
More photos are available in the gallery (you can download the photos from Picasa too).
Monta Vista athletes and results are listed below. Complete results are available on Hank Lawson’s site.
Place Name Year Event Mark
7 Zachary Patti 11 VB1600 4:47.92
13 John Hsiao 11 VB1600 4:54.95
16 Anand Rao 11 VB1600 4:56.94
32 Steven Lim 11 VB1600 5:14.13
42 Salvador Torres-Gonzalez 11 VB1600 5:27.14
22 Yusuke Miyakoshi 11 VB400 1:05.22
25 Guhan Venkataraman 12 VB100 12.67
6 Bumpei Maeda 12 VB800 2:06.99
18 Kevin Krause 11 VB800 2:17.37
27 Jiuyi Li 11 VB800 2:28.52
28 Guhan Venkataraman 12 VB200 26.18
15 Jeffrey Harrison 12 VB3200 10:50.98
5 Relay Team 4x400 3:48.83
Anand Rao, Bumpei Maeda, Steven Lim, John Hsiao
2 Jenny Xu 10 VG1600 5:23.44
17 Julia Chang 10 VB1600 6:04.30
3 Giselle Kaneda 09 VG100HH 17.79
28 Chloe Li 10 VG800 2:49.57
3 Madeleine Yip 09 VG3200 11:54.97
4 Bridget Gottlieb 11 VG3200 11:57.88
12 Rhea Choudhury 10 VGLJ 13-00.50
5 Rhea Choudhury 10 VGTJ 32-00.00
3 Rohan Choudhury 10 FSB1600 4:48.37
15 Brent Mogensen 09 FSB1600 5:01.89
48 Young Guo 10 FSB1600 6:03.18
4 Emilio Torres-Gonzalez 10 FSB3200 10:30.55
9 William Sheu 10 FSBTJ 33-02.50