Some Rearranging of the Record Book at Baylands

After a week of practice being disrupted by air quality, it felt good to be racing again at Baylands/SCVAL3 on Tuesday, October 17.

Baylands is not always a focus meet for MVXC, as often we are traveling to Mt. SAC.  Because of the disruption of the Mt. SAC meet we went in force to Baylands and that gave us a chance to put some new marks in our record book.

First up were our varsity boys, and they went out strong.  Jeffrey Xu stuck with the top 10 pack for the entire 5km distance, finishing a strong 8th place in 16:31.  Jeffrey’s time was good for second all-time for a Monta Vista boy at Baylands–frustratingly, only two seconds from a new course record!  The next five MV boys–Kingsley, Justin, Derek, Aravind and Kyle Tsujimoto–finished in a rush, only 24 seconds separating that group.  The Varsity boys’ team time of 85:34 for the top five was the fastest ever for a Monta Vista team at Baylands, more than two minutes faster than our 2015 edition.

The varsity girls made a group decision to go out conservatively and see how they felt.  As the race proceeded, the girls moved up steadily and eventually Sarah Feng and Triya Roy were charging at the top  Paly girls.  While ultimately the Paly girls held them off, Baylands was a nice step for the team as we prepare for post-season.  Sylvana, Anjali and Akshara rounded out the top five for Monta Vista as the team finished third for the day; one of our strengths remains our flexible finishing order with different athletes rising to the occasion and helping out every week.

The Varsity-2 teams both had strong showings.  For the girls, Serena Geis ran towards the front the whole race and ended up in fourth pace, with freshmen Rachel and Vibha coming in close to each other at 22:19 and 22:38 to help the girls’ team to a solid fourth place finish.  The boys’ team cruised in with a third place finish, lead by Ryan Niu’s strong 17:59 and a pack of juniors and seniors.  The frosh-soph boys closed out the day with a fifth place finish paced by Rohun Agrawal’s 18:23 mark that was good for third place as an individual.

Sarah, Triya, Sylvana, Serena and Anjali all earned spots on the top-10 all time list at Baylands, while Kingsley, Justin, Derek and Aravind joined Jeffrey on the boys’ top-10.

MVXC recorded 18 PRs on Tuesday–a truly impressive number, relative to our seven PRs in 2016 and four in 2015 at Baylands.  There is a table with all the PRs below.  Also…I would encourage all athletes to take a look at your pace at Baylands compared to some prior meets this season.  For example, Claire Lin started out the season with a 8:45 pace for the 2.6 mile Watermelon Time Trial, improved to 7:57 per mile for the 2.95 mile Crystal Springs course, and for the Baylands 3.1 mile course she averaged 7:37 per mile; even accounting for the differences in courses and distances that is a lot of improvement over the course of the season!  Similarly, Darren Yang ran paces of 6:48/6:19/6:09 per mile for the same three races.  Take a look at your own progress, what you have accomplished may surprise you!  It’s easy to get caught up with where you placed in an individual race, however it is important to check and see how far you have come–then look ahead and see how far you would like to travel.

Personal Records Recorded at Baylands Meet

Compete results are at Hank Lawson’s Lynbrook site and analysis at XCStats.  Mr. Ma also posted a lot of great photographs you may want to download.

We are now entering the championship part of our season, with the FUHSD championships next week at Lynbrook, SCVAL championships the following week at Crystal Springs, Central Coast Championships 10 days later back at Toro Park, and finally two weeks later the California State Championships at Woodward Park in Fresno.  As we get to the final weeks of our season, let’s try to do everything we can to get the most out of the effort we have put in all season:

• Plenty of sleep!
• Healthy eating!
• Hydration!
• Take care of our bodies (stretching, follow up on nagging soreness)!
• Do our best to avoid illness–regular and thorough hand washing, if you feel sick DON’T be hugging your teammates 🙂 !

See you soon!