I really love getting up in the dark and loading up a bus with a high school team. There is something special about this experience that you don’t understand until you join a team and go all out committed to your teammates, get out of bed yourself, pull on your uniform, drive in the dark still a little sleepy, see your teammates in the glare of school security lights, and climb up the bus stairs with your friends. You don’t get a chance to do this unless you are on a team. You don’t get to experience an early morning bus ride with your team, until you decide that your teammates are more important than another hour of sleep. Not everyone gets the opportunity to have this experience, but MVXC athletes did! I was already happy as the sun was rising in the East, kids were dozing in the bus behind me, and Chris Isaak was playing traveling music through my earbuds (kids, I know my music is not universally appreciated by all of you, but please, at least once when you are on a pre-dawn road trip, give ‘I Wonder’–by Chris Isaak, not Kanye!–a listen and see what you think. Appropriately for the drive to our race, Chris Isaak was born in Stockton, California. But, I digress).
We never know exactly what to expect when we arrive at a cross country invitational that we have never attended before. What will the course be like, what will the organization be like, how will it feel? I walked into the driving range/tent area for the Pacific Tiger Invitational on Saturday, September 22 and I thought: This invite is going to be really fun! There was so much energy flowing around the team camping area already, many teams and athletes excited in the cool early morning air, I felt this would be a very fun day.
We went out and took a quick look at the course, and feel the ground under our feet. The grass was cut short and the ground felt firm. Our assessment: This could be fast.
First up were our varsity girls. We don’t often get a chance to run varsity first (and our varsity runners took advantage of this schedule–they were all over the course all day cheering for and supporting their teammates), but today we lead off with our quickest 10 girls on the Elkhorn golf course 5km. First time on a new course can be a little disorienting and it can be a challenge. Accepting this challenge, the girls’ team had very fast times and showed a big step from our first race two weeks ago at Toro. Most of our varsity runners were 20-30 seconds per mile faster on the longer but flatter course at Elkhorn. Sylvana Northrop, Triya Roy and Sarah Feng were the first three MVXC runners to scamper home and had mile paces 29, 24 and 34 seconds faster than two weeks ago. Claire Chang dropped 43 seconds per mile in an impressive effort. The varsity girls welcomed back Sanjana, Anjali and Lauren who missed MVXC’s first race with injuries, and we also saw freshman Ellie Hsu run her first (and certainly not last) varsity race with an excellent 21:16 for 5km. At the end of the race, the varsity girls showed they were rounding into competitive season form. The varsity girls got MVXC off to a great start with a 4th place finish out of 35 teams in our race and overall 6th of 71 varsity teams all day. That is an exceptional result against some top NorCal competition!
Our varsity boys were up next and they were eager to get out on the grassy course. Sophomore Rohun Agrawal lead the group around the 5km layout in a excellent 16:43, finishing 43rd out of 310 varsity runners and the 8th sophomore or freshman in the race. Captain Nitin Subramanian recorded an impressive 44 second per-mile pace improvement from Toro as the second MVXC runner, with Andrew Richardson right behind as the two young runners had 17:30-17:31 marks. Senior Karthik Guruvayurappan averaged better than 6 minutes per mile in a race for the first time in any race other than Lynbrook–you have to think he is looking forward to racing on Lynbrook next Tuesday. The MVXC boys ended up a solid 22nd out of top 37 teams racing in the large school division on Saturday.
One of the quirks of the North Coast cross country community is that varsity and the other divisions often run different lengths, and so for the rest of the day the race course would be two miles long. The Monta Vista JV runners jumped on this opportunity, as Ananya Rajagopal had a strong last 1200m to finish with a 13:58 and a 12th place, podium finish. Claire Lin and Ria Kolli both finished in the top 40 of over 170 runners as the JV girls came home with a 7th place finish. Ryan Niu and Christian Dulay lead the JV boys effort resulting in a 15th place team finish. The frosh-soph girls skipped in with a strong 5th place finish, lead by freshman Vivian Lau’s fine 13:07 for 7th place and fellow frosh Anoushka Lakshmi joining her in the top 20. Vibha Iyengar, Upasana Dilip and Vivian Cheng all were in the top 42 out of 261 finishers in the frosh-soph race. The MVXC frosh-soph boys were just off the team podium with their fourth place finish, with freshman Sahil Goal’s 7th place giving Monta Vista our third medal of the day. Matthew Sun, Andrew Cole, Siddhant Patel and Jason Yip rounding out the scoring for the boys, all finishing in the top 53 out of an astounding 370 boys in their race.
This recap focusing on some of the top finishers does not do justice to much of the offer up and down the team. Steph Zhang’s two mile pace was three minutes per mile faster than her pace at the Watermelon time trial. Sean Chen knocked off more than a minute per mile since Toro (and out kicked his competition at the end). MVXC runners of all levels showed a lot of growth, a lot of effort–a lot of grit–already this season!
Also–HUGE shout out to the girls that made origami flowers for the helpers at the meet! That was amazing. Also very impressive was that the girls working on this did not say anything to me, they were not looking for any attention, they just had the idea. I saw them working on the flowers and thought it was a secret-sister thing…only when Vibha asked me if I knew where the meet director was did I realize what they were up to. I am so impressed by the effort…I believe that this made the day for all of the recipients of this show of gratitude. Way…to…go!
Complete results for the Pacific Tigers Invitational are posted on XCStats. Mr. Ma has posted photos that you may download–this is an incredible set of photos, I feel, and I think many of these should end up on FB pages. Also a couple very nice cheer videos!–here is one.
Next up is the first SCVAL meet of the season at Lynbrook. See you there!
