Early morning start for our first race.
The Clovis Invitational is a big deal. Held at Woodward Park on the same course where the California state championships are held, the Clovis Invite attracts teams from Eureka to San Diego that have State podium aspirations. Monta Vista joined the pilgrimage to the 5km course to compete with the State’s best runners on October 6, 2018.
Because the gun fires on our first race at 7:40am, we stay overnight in Fresno. During lunch, we pile in the bus and hit the road. After a quick shake out run on the course in the evening cool, we joined many other teams at a pasta feed hosted by the Clovis cross country booster club, and then headed to our hotel and turned the lights out early.
Shake out and touring the course with other teams.
After a pre-dawn bus ride and warm up, the Varsity girls opened up our day as the sun was coming up. While being a little short handed due to the SAT, our ladies acquitted themselves well. Triya Roy set a new course PR with a 19:23 that is good for 13th on the Monta Vista all-time list. Both Lauren Ling and Ria Kolli ran their fastest 5kms ever. Triya and Sarah Feng won Clovis medals as Monta Vista cruised in with a 13th place finish in the 31 team race.
The Varsity boys quickly followed, with juniors Nitin Subramanian and Kyle Tsujimoto running under 18 minutes on the 5km course. Darren Yang and Karthik Guruvayurappan along with Nitin and Kyle all averaged better than 6 minutes per mile, and Darren ran his fastest 5km ever. Rohun Agrawal and Andrew Richardson both had an opportunity to run in the Frosh-Soph division and they both took advantage, taking home medals while finishing 6th and 14th and recording times better than 17 minutes. Freshmen Sahil Goel and Justin Yu joined Nitin, Kyle and the others with sub-18 5km times. Pranav Reddy, Jason Yip and Will Erf lead our JV boys team against some very tough competition from all over California. Finally, our Frosh-Soph girls’ team gave us a nice end to the day with a 10th place finish. Jannah Sheriff and Ellie Hsu both had medals in their pockets as we headed home to Cupertino.
After a stop for some pizza in Madera, we hit Cupertino again in the late afternoon with the experience and satisfaction with being on the trails with some of the best runners in California. Actually, we ARE some of the best runners in California! Let’s not forget that, we are some of the best athletes around, we deserve to compete with anyone. Coach Johnson and Coach Flatow are always proud to take this team around…it makes us happy to be able to share these great experiences with our kids. Everyone was great on this trip.
Thank you to the Tsujimotos and the McNelises for helping out on this trip.
Complete results are at the XCStats site.
MVXC has a week off of competition, which will allow some focused training. The following week we will be splitting the team as some athletes will compete at the 5km SCVAL 3/Baylands meet on Wednesday, October 17, some athletes will be traveling to Los Angeles to compete in the Mt. SAC Invitational on October 20, and a few will be running in both events.
