MV Opens 2011 Season at Earlybird

**Update**

Coach Payne just forwarded the Monta Vista All-Time List for Toro Park…Kevin’s time was the 2nd fastest all time for Monta Vista runners (second to his own record, by only a few seconds)…and Jenny’s time is the 3rd fastest time by any Monta Vista girl at Toro.  Check out the list under ‘Records’.  Congrats, you two…great runs!

**Update**

Monta Vista cross country kicked off the 2011 season at the Earlybird Invite in Salinas, CA, on Saturday, September 10, at the Toro Park championship course.

Almost 1,400 runners gathered under cloudy skies for one of Northern California’s premier early-season invitationals.  Coach Matt Paquet lead off the team by winning the open/coach’s race with a time that was only a little slower than his high school PR at Toro, showing that either he has not lost a step  of his racing form (or he knows a short cut on the course!).

After the preliminary event, Monta Vista got down to business.  Monta Vista’s own Jenny Xu lead the Freshman Girls’ race wire-to-wire, winning the first race of the year with an impressive 18:59.  Jenny was the only frosh girl to break the 19 minute barrier, and she had the 6th best time of the day for girls of any age.  Julia Chang, Sanjana Bharadwaj, Hannah Ho, Chloe Li, Sarah Weinberg, Lydia Seoh and Miranda Chen finished strong and as a team, the girls finished an impressive 2nd in the freshman race.

The freshman boys did followed up that spectacular showing with an impressive display of their own, as Emilio Torres-Gonzalez finished second out of 190 frosh boys, only 9 seconds behind Chris Foster of Los Gatos.  The coaches are predicting four years of great races between those two SCVAL freshmen!  Rohan Choudhury also ran a very nice race, bringing home another individual medal to Monta Vista.

The sophomores continued Monta Vista’s parade to the podium with third place showings by both the boys’ team (paced by Takuto Doshiro and Anand Rao) and and the girls’ team (lead by Bridget Gottlieb and Kirsten Do).  MV sophomores look deep, strong and fast in the early season.

Among the juniors, the coaches have to start by highlighting Risako Tanida.  Risako finished the 3 mile Toro Park course in 21:49, a spectacular improvement of more than 3 minutes from her sophomore year at Toro Park!  An improvement of that magnitude is not luck, that only comes from hard work over an entire year.  Ajay Rajamani lead the junior boys with an 17:48 PR.

As a group, the seniors sacrificed a bit of their performance by providing a lot of help to the frosh squads.  Without any prodding from the coaches, Michael Lu, Kevin Bishop, Nandini Chitale and Neha Jammu and others took a lot of their prep time and ran or walked a lot of extra miles helping the freshman get prepared for their first high school cross country race.  In case the seniors were wondering, your coaches all noticed, and  we appreciated what you did!–that’s great team spirit on display.  Despite helping prep the younger teams, Kevin still medaled with a 6th place finish.  Nandini improved her time from 2010 by almost two entire minutes, and Neha improved her time from last year by an almost unbelievable 5 minutes and 32 seconds!  (Your coach went back and forth to make sure this was right…that is a stunning improvement.  Every runner should look at this kind of improvement and see what can happen if you set a goal, put your mind to succeeding, and make your goal a reality by working hard.  Incredible.)

Freshman…your coaches hope that you give the seniors and the Varsity a hug or a fist-bump for all the help they provided last Saturday!  And Varsity…thanks for being such good leaders and good teammates.  Stanford comes up in two weeks, and that day is all about you!

Monta Vista sent 75 runners to the starting line at Earlybird, the coachs’ count is that 23 of the starters came back with medals around their necks, and every one of the runners made your coaches proud!

Guest ‘Coach’ Josh Cox

We were all so lucky to have Monta Vista running’s friend and big brother Josh Cox came up from Mammoth Lakes to spend the weekend with us.  Josh is a professional runner, member of the Mammoth Track Club, America’s 50KM record holder, and winner of many marathons (most recently, Rock and Roll Arizona last January).  Josh took a break from his training for the US Olympic Team Marathon Trials and came up to visit Monta Vista.

Josh, his wife Carrie and his infant son Asher joined the team for our pre-race pasta dinner on Friday night at the Gottlieb’s house; we all had a great time hanging with Josh in a relaxed atmosphere.  On Saturday, Josh and his family came down to Salinas and spent the day with us at the invite.  Not only did he say a few words to our athletes as we were getting started, he was also running all over the course…during the sophomore girls’ race, Josh’s Garmin GPS told him that he ran 2 miles to cheer the girls on during their 3 mile race!  He finished the day having run 23 miles!–I’m pretty sure that was not the workout plan that his coach had drawn up for the day, but it says a lot about how much Josh cares about the Monta Vista runners!

After the last race, Josh talked to us a bit about the race and what is ahead of us as runners.  Running is a sport where we all get as much out as we are willing to put in; if we commit to doing our best, we will be rewarded.  Work hard, get better; that’s simple, but it is not easy.

That’s a great message as we were heading back home after a pretty wonderful day of racing.  See you at practice on Monday, Monta Vista!

Thank you parents!

Thanks to all the parents who drove us to the race, brought lots of great treats (Suanne, Jodie, Barb and Kirk want the recipe for some kind of raw food, peanut-buttery, chocolatey, nut bar–whomever made that treat, that treat was great!  Send the recipe to Coach Flatow, please!) and cheered like crazy!

We could not have had such a great day without your support and efforts.  We know you took most of your Saturday so we could race.  Thanks so much!

Photographs

Ezra Gordon, another friend of Monta Vista Running, was down at Salina taking photographs.  Check back to the Gallery, we will be uploading his photos when we are done processing the files.  We’ve seen his work from last track season and we know he always delivers some great images!

Links

The post-meet story from the coach of Earlybird’s host school:

http://nmcxc.tripod.com/id128.html

Complete results:

http://www.dyestatcal.com/ATHLETICS/XC/2011/ebird.htm

Monta Vista Results

(I may have missed a couple of names as I did this manually this morning; if your name is not here, look at the results link above for your time.)

MONTA VISTA AT EARLYBIRD 2011