MVXC is showing impressive form in races and in practice as the Santa Clara Valley Athletic League championships await!
FUHSD Championships/Lynbrook Invitational
The FUHSD Championships are held as part of the Lynbrook Invitational. The short, flat, fast competition tat is a tune up and preview for the SCVAL Championships the following week. This year, the course had to be changed to accommodate construction, so there is no opportunity for athletes to set new PRs but there is always an opportunity to run fast!
Coach challenged the athletes to have their fastest pace for any race this year, and the frosh-soph boys took that to heart. Tanay Parikh went out aggressively and challenged the leaders the entire FS race, earning a fifth place finish with consistent effort throughout the race to go with a hard finish. This was the first race where Tanay was under six minutes per mile. Ruhaan Shah and Neal Jain also dipped under six minutes per mile for the first time as they also earned medals in 13th place and 18th place, with Brandon Xu adding to the collection of hardware in 22nd place. Sophomore Denny Dong moved up to varsity and was right behind senior Justin Yu, as Justin and Denny went 8-9 to bring home two varsity medals. The varsity boys team looks to be in a good position as they work to qualify for the CCS championship meet.
The varsity girls had a nine year streak of FUHSD championships to defend, and Nikhita Saldi, Jannah Sheriff, Vivian Lau and Sydney Stevens got rid of the suspense early by placing four athletes in the first six finishers! MVXC has now won the FUHSD Championship for ten straight races…that is ownage. Ellie Hsu closed out the scoring at number five, as the girls outscored second place Lynbrook 28-64 for a tenth straight championship. Nikhita gave MVXC it’s third straight girls’ individual champion, taking home a big cup that will have her name engraved below Sarah Feng and Sylvana Northrop. Agnes Wang, Margaux Francoeur, and Nerea Northrop joined the first five atop the podium, giving the MVXC girls 8 of the 24 varsity medals awarded! Ethan Lam and Amogh Rajagopal added two more medals in the JV boys’ race. In the JV girls race, Valerie Ayzenberg settled for second as she ran out of track in her valiant attempt to chase down the winner from Lynbrook. This proved to be a theme for the JV girls team as the team traded finisher for finisher with the host Lynbrook; the two teams turned an invitational into a dual meet as both teams had five athletes in the top ten, leaving no room for any other team! Lynbrook prevailed by a single point, taking first by a single point, 27-28…next time coach says that passing one person can make a difference, believe him! Let’s get them next week at Leagues, OK? The girls salved their wounds with a pile of individual hardware as Sophia Chen, Megan Nieh, Anika Bhandakar, Karena Lai, Sandhya Fastnacht, Raje Kenyan, Vera Bondar, Siran Gao and Sudipti Dantuluri along with Valerie all earned medals!
While the change in course meant we could not track PRs, 92% of the athletes on the roster had their fastest race pace of the year–and that matters. Raje, Vera, Sudipti, Joey Suresh, Insiah Kizilbash, Aditi Dantuluri, Paru Joshi, Seshanth Karthik, Jayden Lim, Darren Lin and William Wu all were a minute per mile faster than their average race pace for the season, with Ari, Tanay, Matt Sun and Ruhaan all averaging under six minutes per mile for the first time this season.
As they went to the starting line, and in the days leading up to the FUHSD championships, the athletes were asked to challenge their pacing a bit. The team wanted to be a little uncertain if they could maintain their starting pace; we didn’t want to be foolish, but we did want to challenge our limits a little bit. The team accepted the challenge and the results demonstrated how far we have come in the last few months. We are improving week by week and that is what matters most in running, and most of life. Really, it’s hard to imagine a better race day as the team gets ready for SCVALs.
Results are posted on XCStats and on Lynbrook Sports. I’m guessing that Agnes will be posting some more photos soon, too.
Some Practice Notes
While Lynbrook was a chance to show our improvements, practice is where the improvements are made, and MVXC has had a few strong practices this past couple of weeks. The team finally was able to schedule a Saturday of Matador Miles, a workout that we normally put in the books earlier in the season; 21 athletes were up to see the sunrise and also put up some pretty impressive marks and volume. Alex had the highest volume on the team with five reps (he felt inspired by the prior year marks recorded by Rohun Agrawal and Andrew Richardson). Alex and Ellie had the quickest pace for the boys’ and the girls’ teams. It is always good to see athletes happy and satisfied after putting a good, hard workout in the bank (and waffles do not hurt, either).
The team followed that up with a strong cutdown workout the Monday before heading to Lynbrook, and watching the team, it’s easy to see how far we have come as a group. Watching the workout was completely different from the beginning of the season. Athletes ran with a lot more organization and purpose, and the team has learned a lot about how to work on a track and in a group. There is determination in athletes’ body language. And so many athletes recorded times with the speed progressions we were looking for in this workout. At the beginning of the season in workouts like this, an observer would see a lot more milling around and foot dragging or just confusion, and the marks for reps would be all over the place as athletes struggled to find their pace or start hitting a wall before the workout was complete. There is a lot less of that confusion now! It’s really wonderful to see how far the team has come.
Saturday morning we were up for sunrise with a last workout before leagues, a 2700m tuneup for most of the team and a longer cut-down workout for the athletes aiming to peak at the CCS meet in two weeks. In any case, it was great to see so many athletes have the passion to bang out a workout (and play a game) before most people were even out of bed.
I hope you think about how far you have come, as an athlete and as part of a team. Don’t take your progress for granted. Cross country is hard. Not many people make the choices you have made to take this challenge. You have come a long way, and don’t take that for granted! Take a few moments to reflect on your personal journey the past few months.
Alumni Update
This weekend, Rohun Agrawal (MVXC 2021) and the CalTech cross country team advanced from their league championships to NCAA regional action, while Triya Roy’s Johns Hopkins University team won their 13th straight conference title while also moving on to the NCAA regional meet! NCAA cross country regionals will be held in two weeks, the same week as our CCS championships.
