CCS Semis: 3 from MV Advance! | Monta Vista Running

On a hot day in Gilroy, Monta Vista track & field stayed hot also, sending three athletes onwards to the Central Coast Section Finals!

The Central Coast Section covers more than 130 schools from San Francisco to south of Monterey, and only eight athletes (twelve in the 1600 and 3200) move on to the track and field finals in each event. We are now breathing very rarified air!

Kevin Bishop continued his fine senior season with a 9:25.26 in the 3200M semi-final, a time good enough to win his heat comfortably and send him onwards to the finals with the second fastest seed time. Kevin has had a strong season and we are looking forward to his race next Friday! The CCS has a strong field of distance runners again this year and the finals should be terrific! Kevin is looking really, really strong right now.

Last year, Kevin was the only Monta Vista representative in the CCS Finals–but this year he will have company. Jenny Xu moved on to the CCS finals with a disciplined 11:47.45 clocking in the 3200M. Other than a fast first lap to get position in the pack, and a fast last lap to finish, every one of Jenny’s laps was inside a 4 second window from 88 to 92! Jenny ran that race just like we drew it up. Jenny is the only freshman girl to qualify for the CCS finals in the 32ooM this year!

While Jenny and Kevin certainly lived up to their recent awards–most outstanding athletes of the year for MVT&F–the performance of the day has to be Arvind Rao’s race in the 800M. The CCS field for the boys’ 800M is stacked this year, and Arvind’s time was not in the top eight going in to the semi-finals. Arvind found a nice spot in the pack right at the break line and stayed there for the first 60% of the race. He was staying with the pack–which sounds easy–but the first 400M split was roughly 58 seconds! Arvind started to make his move in the back straight with 300M to go and when he came out of the turn the pack had blown up and he and one other runner were racing for the finish line! Arvind ended up posting his third personal record in three weeks, a 1:56.52 that was the third fastest 800M time of the day! Last year, Arvind had a 2:02.69 in SCVAL to finish his season; this year, he has dropped his already good PR by six seconds–in the 800M that is really hard to do! Arvind’s achievement is a reward for all his hard work over the past twelve months: Joining Mike Dudley’s cross-country camp last summer and working his core with Chris Hallford, a dedicated cross-country season, a solid winter of base-building, and some really nasty workouts all track season.

And what is Kevin, Jenny, and Arvind’s reward? Another week of workouts!

Making the CCS tournament at all means the athlete is one of the 32 best in the section, and we had four other athletes competing on Saturday. Junior Gokul Parakulam was not able to duplicate his PR jump of the prior week, ending his season in the semis; but he walked out of the Gilroy track determined to be back even stronger next year. The Monta Vista boys ran a personal best 3:29.98 for the 4×400 relay; this was not quite fast enough to get the team into the finals, however this is the first time that Monta Vista has gone under 3:30 in more than 10 years as far as I can tell from the (sketchy) record book! Congratulations on a great last race of the season to Surafael Yared, Bumpei Maeda, Michael Lu and Arvind Rao!

Hearing Michael Lu yell out ‘I love track and field!’ across the Gilroy track at the end of the day was a fitting end to the meet for all of us.

When I got back to my car after the meet, my temperature gauge said that it was 100 in Gilroy. Monta Vista track & field, you all were even hotter!