Azusa Distance Meet of Champions

On March 23, the distance runners of the Monta Vista track and field team got into cars at 6am to trek down I-5 to Los Angeles for one of the most anticipated meets of the year–the Azusa Meet of Champions.

The Meet of Champions is a premier distance only event–from 7am on Saturday morning until almost 10pm on Saturday night, the meet is back-to-back 800m, 1600m and 3200m races.  The races are stacked by current ability and personal records with the goal of more than 100 competitive races during the day.

As the sun came up, the Monta Vista 3200m girls were warming up in the dawn chill.  Claire Chang and Sanjana Borle got the team rolling with nice runs, as Claire scored a season best mark and Sanjana went under 12 for the first time (not the last!) and recorded a 11:52 for a new PR.

Our 800 runners went out aggressively from the start in successful pursuit of three PRs.  Anjali Thontakudi pushed the pace of her heat from the outset and scored a 2:30.86–agonizingly close to the 2:30 barrier–and brought back Monta Vista’s first medal of the day with a 3rd place finish.  Victoria Tung and Justin Lin followed with two more medals and two more PRs in their races.  Then our 3200m boys hit the track and threw down three great races–PRs and medals for Jeffrey Xu, Aravind Meyyappan and Siddhant Patel.  Jeffrey’s 9:53 is setting him up to get much deeper into the 9s as the season goes on, and Aravind is getting awfully close to that magic 10 minute barrier!

With the 800s and the 3200s in the books, the main course of the day–the 1600s–started rolling on the track.  Nitin Subramanian’s 4:48, while not a PR, does position him well for a sub-4:40 at Top-8 or Leagues with a solid month of work.   Rohun Agrawal had a big PR while finishing 4th, and Kamyar Moradi and Jeff Flewelling both had solid races under their seed marks.

For the girls, Triya Roy rolled in with a 5:26, a solid mark for March and setting her up for more fast times in April and May.  Sarah Feng won her heat with a sparkling 5:20.32, taking the lead in the midpoint of the race and opening up a big gap that she held on the way to winning her race–a fierce performance.  Lauren Ling and Upasana Dilip both recorded massive PRs; Lauren’s 5:50 had her under 6 for the first time while Upasana’s 6:13 earned her a second place medal.  Upasana had drove that heat out hard and fast and several girls, as well as Upasana, were dragged to new PRs.  Jason Tsujimoto wrapped up the day with a PR of his own in the varsity boys’ 1600m race.

Overall, Monta Vista ended the day with 11 PRs and 13 medals out of 17 starts.  What a great day for coaches, athletes and parents!

Thank you to all the parents who drove us down for the weekend–we could not have done this without you!

Complete results for every race are posted here.  If you go to the bottom of this post, you will find a table for all the Monta Vista runners’ results as well as a link to the specific races where we competed.

If you tap the result time for each runner below, the link will take you to the results for that specific race (cool!).