The Crystal Preview race is our first chance to get up on the Crystal Springs cross country course–one of the finest cross country venues anywhere, and Monta Vista’s home course. Crystal and Monta Vista go together–the hills in Fremont Older Open Space where we train every week are the best preparation imaginable for racing at Crystal.
Our primary goal for Crystal Preview is to learn and re-learn how to run hard on the course–where to be smart, where to push. We accomplished this goal and also put up some nice numbers. Our Varsity-2 boys took a nice 6th place out of the 14 Santa Clara Valley Athletic League teams, with Christian Dulay and Jeff Flewelling our first two runners across the line. The freshman boys took 3rd and our sophomore boys took 6th place in their races. Justin Yu and Sahil Goel looked great coming in 1-2 and Andrew Cole not much further back in 12th, while Siddhant Patel was in the top 1o for the sophomores. The Varsity boys finished in 8th place, with Rohun Agrawal, Andrew Richardson, and Nitin Subramanian all under 18 minutes and running better than six minutes per mile on the hilly course.
The Varsity-2/JV girls took a narrow second place to a tough Paly squad. Elisabeth Hsu lead the team in with a third place finish at 20:59 (a mark under 21 at Crystal is very, very good); junior Ananya Rajagopal and freshman Vivian Lau joined Ellie in the top 10. The varsity girls ran a sparkling 97:13 team time with a top five spread of only 26 seconds; this is the fastest time of any Monta Vista girls team for the Crystal Preview race and our fifth best team time ever on the Crystal course! Sylvana Northrop, Jannah Sheriff, Triya Roy, Sarah Feng and Sanjana Borle were all under 20 minutes, and Serena Geis, Claire Chang, Lauren Ling and Rachel Jiang were under 21 giving the girls 10 athletes under 21 in total for the day.
Personal records were recorded by Triya Roy, Sanjana Borle, Serena Geis, Vibha Iyengar, Rachel Jiang, Sylvana Northrop, Karthik Guruvayurappan, Siddhant Patel, Rohan Puthukudy, John McNelis, Andrew Richardson, Tyler Liu, and Rohun Agrawal. A special shout out to the athletes that had PRs of more than one minute: Ryo Kather (1:33), Alex Richardson (1:33), Emily Hu (1:29), Pranav Reddy (1:26), Vivian Cheng (1:12) and Conner Hsu (1:03).
Well done, everyone! Crystal Preview was a good day for MVXC, and a great preparation for League Championships in four weeks.
Complete results and analysis are available at XCStats. Mr Ma has another fantastic set of photos that you can download from his Monta Vista photo site. Mr Slaney (the father of a graduated Palo Alto runner) also has some photos posted of the whole race with some good MVXC photos mixed in.
On Saturday October 6, about half the team will be traveling to Fresno for the Clovis Invitational. SCVAL3 will be at Baylands on Wednesday, October 17.
