MVXC15 had it’s first league cluster meet of the season on Tuesday the 29th, and the team was rolling!
It’s always hard to tell where a school is in the league during cluster meets, as different teams come to the race with varying agendas–to truly flat-out race, to ‘run through’ the meet, or use the race as a workout. Monta Vista came into Lynbrook fairly aggressively with most of our runners looking to get some ‘mental callouses’ through a hard effort after two great workout weeks.
The team showed great, with first place finishes in both the Varsity Girls and the Frosh-Soph Boys divisions! Individually, we had 13 personal records on the 2.1 mile Lynbrook course–and that is a bigger number than you might think, as most runners had never run the course before. For those that did run Lynbrook before, we all ran late in the season; beating a late season time with the second race in a season is hard to do. Nevertheless, 13 runners did have PRs–Isabelle, Sabrina, Jae Youn, Brent, Andy Ma, Dan Z, Lucas, Anindit, Jason, Rahul, Matt Chen, Edwin, and Aidan (with a 1:14 PR!). Well done!
Another interesting metric is mile pace compared to Earlybird. We should be faster–we have had two weeks more training since Earlybird, and Lynbrook is shorter and flat as a pancake. Still…we can see that some of our athletes learned a lot about their capabilities and fitness levels and chose to be much more aggressive in their races at Lynbrook. I counted 18 athletes who ran more than one minute per mile faster at Lynbrook than at Earlybird, and another 16 that were within 10 seconds of that mark! That is a huge step up in speed. Sure the course contributed to that increase, but also a lot of this came from inside of runners. We are learning much more about what we are capable of doing, and exploring our limits a bit. We are taking some risks and finding that our bodies and minds are able to deliver for us. We are find we are capable of being uncomfortable for a longer and longer period of time. Keep this up and you are going to learn much more about yourself and what you can do!
Photos from Lynbrook have been posted by Mr. Ma at our Picasa site. Complete results can be found here, and our team analysis is at XCStats.
