MVXC athletes have two assignments!
First: Mark your calendar for the MVXC Season Banquet on Saturday, March 27 at 6pm. Our banquet will be held on zoom but that does not mean it is ‘virtual’–this will be a real team banquet!
Second: Sign up for the food! For $10, you will receive all the ingredients needed to make two fabulous French omelets–and instruction from chefs trained at some of the best restaurants in the world.
FAQs…
So MVXC is having a season banquet–even during a pandemic? YES! While COVID precautions make it unsafe to plan a group event indoors (for now), and social distancing protocols would mean that outdoors we would have to spread out over a huge area and pot lucks are out the window, MVXC adapts. We will have our banquet on zoom and make the best of a tough year.
But if there is a ‘banquet’ shouldn’t there be food? YES! We will cook together. Before the banquet, everyone who signs up for the cooking class will receive a box of food delivered to their front doors. You will have all the ingredients to make two fabulous French omelets. At 6pm, at the start of the banquet, we will cook the omelets together, with guidance from trained chefs.
Why is Coach Flatow so hung up on arranging cooking lessons for MVXC athletes? Because if you can cook, you will always have friends. Coach has cooked for friends at college in Santa Clara and Chicago, in apartments in Boston, in ski cabins in Vermont, on cycling trips around Tahoe, in front of tents in Colorado and Alaska. Tubs of pasta, pots of chili, stir fries, pizzas. Epic dinners on white tablecloths and grilled cheese sandwiches in cramped little kitchens. For family, real and found, friends who are happy or sad. The point is to cook, to gather, to feed people we care about in their body and soul, to say that we care about them by making them something to eat.
And learning how to cook an omelet is pretty epic! If you can whip up a beautiful omelet, you will be a hero in your first college apartment. When everyone else is pouring boiling water over instant ramen, in almost the same time you can churn out a couple omelets for a fancy Sunday post-long-run brunch or a late night dinner after a long study session. Cooking an omelet is an impressive skill that you can add to the risotto, ramen and mac-and-cheese we cooked together the last few months of quarantine. When you put beautiful omelets in front of your friends in college or after, can tell the bemused group, ‘I learned how to cook omelets in high school cross country!’ I don’t think that will be a typical story.
Do I have to cook to be part of the banquet? No, you can join the video call after the cooking class and simply watch the awards section. (But why, oh why, don’t you want to learn how to cook an omelet? It’s fun.)
Can parents participate? Of course! We hope all our parents come to the banquet.
Will we have all our MVXC banquet traditions? I hope so! I think that the juniors and seniors are already working on senior send-offs, senior awards, etc.
What about next year? I sincerely hope and believe that by Fall of 2021, we will be back to normal. Like all of us, during the last year I have have been overly optimistic about how fast we would put the pandemic behind us and be back to normal (I have boxes of SCVAL and Rustbuster medals because for SURE we would be back to normal by October!). However…there is quite a bit of good news lately. I just read that Israel, which has the highest rate of vaccinations of any country, is finding that only 3.5 people out of 100,000 are having serious COVID related symptoms…as the United States continues to vaccinate and achieves results like these, I believe that we will get back to something more like 2019 for school and athletics–and that means races like Pacific Tiger and Clovis, Three Course Challenge and SCVALs–and also big, loud, raucous and delicious banquets for MCVX! I am looking forward to those days with all of you.
Until then…let’s cook omelets!