For the second year in a row, MVXC headed up to Stockton for the second meet of the season. The team joined some of the top teams in the Sac-Joaquin Section along with a scattering of CCS teams at the 10th Annual Pacific Tiger Invitational.
After a bit of an adventure getting on the road, the team rolled into the Elkhorn Country Club golf course. First up were our varsity girls, starting the meet off with a 5km race against the other larger schools. Sylvana Northrop, Triya Roy and Jannah Sheriff got out together through the first mile and kept pouring on the effort to take 4th, 8th and 15th place, the best performance by any top three runners at the meet! Ellie Hsu and Vivian Lau completed the top five scoring for the varsity girls, and the MV varsity girls ended up with fourth place in the large school race, and fourth out of 56 teams competing at Elkhorn–a strong performance for our girls as we get the season rolling!
Next, the varsity boys lined up. The boys were planning to build on the good start at Lagoon Valley, with both Rohun Agrawal and Matthew Sun back and rolling today. Rohun aced his first test of the year, blazing a 5:14 pace for a 16:14 5km and a fourth place finish! Andrew Richardson, Sahil Goel, and seniors Kyle Tsujimoto and Nitin Subramanian completed the top five, and Monta Vista was the 8th place team in the large school division and 10th out of 82 teams on the day–another memorable performance for MVXC19 at Pac Tiger!
Claire Lin and Emily Hu lead the JV girls, while the JV boys gave MVXC another excellent team showing with an 8th place finish lead by a nearly side-by-side finish by seniors Tyler Liu and Alex Richardson.
The frosh-soph girls’ team raced to the podium with a second place team finish in the large school frosh-soph race, a mere five points back of a strong San Ramon Valley team! Avani Kalari won the whole race; winning a cross country race is really a special achievement. Sydney Stevens and Nerea Northrop joined Avani on the medal podium, freshman Agnes Wang scored in her first high school race, and Anoushka Lakshmi rounded up the scoring for the second place Matadors. Our newest boys wrapped up the day for Monta vista. Freshmen Alex Nguyen and Thomas Philip were the first two boys in for the Frosh-Soph boys team, which took home a 20th place finish to complete the day for MVXC!
Improvement Matters/Grit Matters
On MVXC, continuous improvement matters most–demonstrating the grit to keep working over a long period of time to get better from any level. Often it’s not the kids at the front of the pack that demonstrate the most improvement; frequently it’s the kids that start out relatively modestly that earn the most respect of their teammates through long-term, dedicated, gritty work to improve. Personal records set at the 2019 Pacific Tiger Invitational include:
2019 MVXC PRs on the Elkhorn Course
Serena Yip 2 mile 17:11 (73 second PR)
Andrew Richardson 5km 16:42 (49 second PR)
Sean Chen 2 mile 14:33 (49 second PR)
Triya Roy 5km 19:08 (43 second PR)
Kyle Tsujimoto 5km 18:25 (40 second PR)
Rohun Agrawal 5km 16:46 (32 second PR)
Ellie Hsu 5km 20:49 (27 second PR)
Conner Hsu 5km 18:38 (25 second PR)
Sylvana Northrop 5km 18:57 (23 second PR)
Emily Hu 2 mile 15:33 (19 second PR)
Sotirios Kougiouris 2 mile 13:11 (12 second PR)
Andrew Chen 2 mile 14:03 (7 second PR)
Christian Dulay 2 mile 12:18 (7 second PR)
There are other ways of looking at improvement also. Check out some of the drops in average pace from race to race. Yes, there are some big differences–Watermelon was a mid-week event, Lagoon Valley was hilly, Pacific was hotter. Nonetheless, you can look at Andrew Richardson’s progression from a pace of 5:48 per mile at Watermelon, 5:34 at the longer and more hilly Lagoon Valley course, and 5:23 on the 5km at Elkhorn, or Jannah’s 7:07/6:47/6:15, and make some positive inferences about changes fitness and race-readiness for individuals and our team! Take a look at that data too.
Complete results are at XCStats.
Great job everyone! Next up is the league season opener at Baylands.
Sorry about the photographs everyone! No Mr. Ma, team photographer, so you have fewer and worse photos this week!
