I don’t think I wanted this season to end…so I’ve been putting off the last mvrunning post of the cross country year. But, I can’t put it off forever! So here we go, starting with…
Central Coast Section Championships
The MVXC girls’ and boys’ cross country teams have both earned spots on the starting line at the CCS championships every year beginning in 2011! That is a truly impressive feat. To give you some perspective, that streak began when freshman Tanay Parikh was four years old! My goodness.
The day turned out to be warmer than a usual November at Crystal Springs, and was not a great day for fast times. Sophomore Denny Dong lead the boys with a 17:09, good for 39th place and the fifth fastest sophomore time in CCS this year. Senior Justin Yu was next with a 17:46 in 67th place, while Ari Rajaram, Alex Nguyen and Andrew Cole completed the scoring as Monta Vista finished 11th in all of CCS! Denny, Ari, Alex and Tanay will be building on this experience as they work to lead the MVXC boys back to the CCS championships in 2022. For the girls, senior Jannah Sheriff lead the team with a fine 19:34 that was good for 18th place in CCS, almost equaling her 16th place as a freshman in 2018. Seniors Vivian Lau and Ellie Hsu, who inspired us with so many long side-by-side training runs all season long, gave MVXC three seniors at the top with Sydney Stevens and Margaux Francouer chipping in to give Monta Vista a seventh place finish in the championships. Sydney and Margaux, together with Agnes Wang and Nikhita Saldi, will all return in 2022 for Monta Vista–with State aspirations, I think.
Margaux and Andrew both had PRs on a difficult day to put up fast times.
Complete results are posted, and there are photos too.
MVXC Season Banquet
The team had the season awards banquet on Tuesday, November 16. After several years at the school, this year the team returned to the Quinlan Center — which was a lot of fun and added to the atmosphere. Thank you so much to all the parents who helped make this possible, particularly Rita Hsu, Ruth Stevens and Devi Jasti and also all the others who chipped in to help in the planning as well as the evening of the event. The awards night was quite special!
If you are looking for photos of the event, Mr. Ma took plenty!
A pdf of the awards presentation is here.
Random Stuff
- At the NCAA D3 cross country championships, the Johns Hopkins University women captured their 7th national championship! This is relevant to Monta Vista because we have sent three runners to compete for Hop in the last decade: Bridget Gottlieb MVXC14 (now a researcher at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia), Julia Chang MVXC15 (now a PhD candidate in chemistry at UCLA), and Triya Roy (a sophomore at Hop now). Two things about their race…at 1km, all seven Hop runners were within one second of each other! Also, catch this: runner Ella Baran, who lead Hopkins with a 9th place finish, was in 48th place at 1km. Ella passed 39 other runners to earn All-American status! Lots of good lessons here: Be patient, trust your teammates, never give up, keep pushing for every spot. Be proud that MVXC and the Hopkins teams have links!
- Winter running really and truly matters! Not only for track season. If we have goals for the 2022 cross country season, our work towards those goals starts now. Winter running is a step to improvement in our track seasons, which prepares us for summer running, which gets us ready for cross country 2022. If we don’t progress with each rung of that ladder, we are one rung lower. Winter running does not have to be incredibly stressful. Our goals should be to bump our volume a bit, increase our conversational pace a bit, strengthen our weak points, and mentally recharge with many conversational miles with our teammates. Don’t put this off! Don’t hesitate to contact coach if you would like to discuss your plans for winter running, he has completed individual plans for several of you at the athlete’s request.
- Consider getting a team together for the Christmas Relays–it’s fun!