Before the start of the 2018 Central Coast Section Girls’ D1 Championship Race on November 18, 2018
I’ve let myself get both busy and distracted over the last couple of weeks, so there is a lot to catch up with, starting with…
Dealing with Air Quality Problems
On Thursday, November 8, the Camp Fire started near Paradise, California. By Friday, smoke was thick throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. All outdoor activities were discontinued at Monta Vista and other area schools (over the next two weeks, some schools completely shut down). That Friday, we received the news that Central Coast Section championships scheduled for the next day would be postponed until Monday. The Monta Vista boys’ and girls’ cross country teams relocated Friday practice to treadmills, and we trained for the day indoors with filtered air.
By Saturday, it was pretty clear that we would not be running on Monday, although we would not get official notice of that decision until the next day. Sunday at 1pm, we were told that the championships would be delayed until the next Saturday. On Wednesday, with air quality still at dangerous levels, another notice told us that the championships could be either at the Crystal Springs course on Saturday, or perhaps the Toro Park course 150 miles to the South on Sunday. Finally on Thursday, the decision to move to Toro on Sunday—pending adequate air quality in Salinas—was announced.
I review all these developments because it is easy to forget the chaos of those ten days. Every day, we walked around in billowing smoke that made our throats feel funny and our heads ache and left us a little tired and irritable. Every day, we had really hard decisions to make about workouts—were we training for a race in two days or eight days or nine days? Would we be racing a hilly 2.95 miles or a flattish 3.0? And every day we were training indoors (pretty darn boring), figuring out rides to different locations, modifying workouts for treadmills, doing some exercises to counter the differences in quad/hamstring balance on treadmills.
This chaos could have had a real negative effect on our team—or any team. We could have spent a lot of emotional energy thinking about and talking about how unfair the situation was, and asking ‘why doesn’t CCS do this or that?’—there is a chat room full of comments from people writing about different decisions CCS could have made. But the thing is—there is not much about the overall situation that we could control. There were people trying to put out the fire, in the meantime it was going to burn and we had no control. We could not control the wind or weather or inversion layer. The people from CCS who were in charge of the championships were doing the best they could and were not asking for our opinions. There were a limited number of things we could control—where we practiced, how we should practice, and our attitudes towards the situation.
This situation was a grit test. And the Monta Vista boys and girls earned a solid A+. We did not miss a single workout. People were upbeat and positive and making the best of the treadmills. And while no one got on the treadmills thinking ‘Sweet! This is so much better than running outside at Matadors’ Point’, I felt that our athletes made an effort to have a positive attitude. Runners were on time, ready to run, and made the best of a bad situation.
I think this is so important in life. When life throws the unexpected at us, how we react will determine the final outcome. Spending a lot of effort on denial and complaining about the unfairness of it all is usually unproductive. What is usually more productive is moving on to answer the question, ‘OK, the situation changed, now what do we do?’ We don’t choose all that life throws at us, but we can choose how we react to the obstacle.
I was proud of our teams. I was as annoyed as anyone when the air quality went South. The important thing was to just get on with it, deal with the issue. The longer the poor air persisted, and our kids continued to work hard and stay positive, the prouder I got and the more confident we would do well when we finally got to race.
CCS Race Weekend
When we first got the news that the race might be moved to Toro Park, we immediately dialed up one of our drills to simulate the tricky start and the flattish first mile and a half of the Toro course. When it was official that we would be running on Sunday, we worked backwards to schedule our standard big-meet workout run-up. And finally, we had a pasta night on Saturday, the night before our races. (Truth be told, this pasta night was really for me…during the past week, the team had split up into groups so that we did not overwhelm any club or workout facility that was gracious enough to let us use their space and treadmills. I was getting depressed not seeing all my kids together at one place at the same time, so I figured let’s all go out to dinner for pasta and bonding before CCS. It made me feel good and I hope the team had fun too!).
On Sunday morning, I got up early and drove down to Salinas to arrive before 8am…drinking my coffee on the way. I got to Toro as the sun was rising and saw blue sky for the first time in a week! I ran the course twice, once to see what shape the course was in and once just because I was so happy. Toro was in great shape, clean air was helping my lungs felt better than they had in a week, and the weather was cool enough that I was still wearing long sleeves the whole run. This was going to be a great day to race!
In the D2 boys and girls races there were some fast times, and as they got their awards the coach of the D2 girls’ champion St. Francis team shouted out ‘Go Matadors!’ from the stage when she saw me. The kids arrived in time to see me receive a CCS honor coach award…which I hope pumped up the team. Finally, at 2:40pm, exactly eight days after originally scheduled…it was time for the Monta Vista varsity boys to line up and race in the CCS Championships.
D1 Varsity Boys CCS Championship Race
The Monta Vista boys lined up with the youngest team in the race, I am pretty sure—two freshmen, two sophomores, two juniors and a senior. The guys got off to a nice start and kept moving solidly. At the half way split, MVXC were in 10th place and over the next 1.5 miles the team moved up more. The boys shaved off seventeen more points while covering the last hilly section of the course. Sophomore Andrew Richardson was the first MV runner to cross the line in 28th place with a 16:57. Andrew moved up an impressive 23 places in the last 1.5 miles! Sophomore Rohun Agrawal was the next MV boy to cross the line in 33rd place, moving up from eight places from 41st at the half way point while recording a 17:04 mark on the three mile course. Andrew and Rohun were the seventh and eighth sophomores to finish the race. Freshman Sahil Goel ran a 17:43 to finish in 66th place; only two freshmen were in front of Sahil. Right behind Sahil were Junior Captain Nitin Subramanian and hard charging freshman Justin Yu with almost identical 17:50 marks and finished in 69th and 70th places; Justin had moved up 15 places after the first split was recorded and was still moving fast when he hit the finish line. Kyle Tsujimoto and Karthik Guruvayurappan wrapped things up for Monta Vista.
Andrew, Justin, Sahil and Karthik all recorded personal records on the Toro course, Karthik notching the largest PR with a 1:09 drop to cap his Monta Vista career. Sahil and Justin are now the 9th and 10th fastest MV freshmen all-time on Toro, while Rohun and Andrew end their sophomore years as the 3-4 MV sophomores (ahead of recent varsity mainstays Rohan Choudhury (about to graduate from CalTech, and a four year varsity runner for the Engineers) and Brent Mogensen (now a junior at Santa Clara University). Rohan and Brent both built upon their sophomore marks to earn individual California State Meet berths and all-CCS status as seniors.
After being predicted to finish 11th, the boys took home a 10th place finish. The boys got a measure of payback by finishing just in front of Cupertino, who had taken second place in the De Anza League finals two weeks before (where MV went home with fourth). In the merged scoring including all the other divisions, MV was in front of Lynbrook who had took 3rd at DAL; so MV finished in front of two of the three teams that had finished ahead of us at Leagues two weeks ago.
The Monta Vista boys’ team finished 2018 on a real roll. With six of our seven CCS starters returning, plus our alternate, freshman Matthew Sun, we have an opportunity for several years of consistency. There are several other boys competing for varsity spots too (Sid Patel, Alex Richardson, Andrew Cole, Pranav Reddy, Conner Hsu, Jason Yip and several others may have similar designs…) and this competition and depth will help us all. I feel like a reasonable goal from year to year for hard-working boys is to improve race pace by 10-20 seconds per mile per year (30 to 60 seconds for a 5km race). If you project something like that for our young athletes…you get some pretty interesting team time projections. Watch out for this group the boys have a lot of potential!
Boys results are up on XCStats.
Mr. Ma has lots of good photos posted also.
D1 Varsity Girls CCS Championship Race
Seeing the varsity boys run well and exceed the pre-meet predictions indicated that all the MVXC alternative indoor training was effective during the week of smoke. After the boys got us started, the girls were now ready to race and they were determined. Deciding to be more aggressive early in the race, Triya Roy, Sylvana Northop and Sarah Feng were all up with freshman Jannah Sheriff towards the back of the first big group of runners at the 400 mark, while Sanjana Borle had been caught in a clump at the first hard right turn and was further back. Claire Chang and Lauren Ling were both in solid positions and running well. After the athletes had finished the first loop and hit the 1.5 mile mark, Sarah had moved up to 8thplace with Triya, Sanjana, Sylvana and Jannah running side by side only five seconds back running side by side in 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th. Sanjana must have passed something like 80-100 kids to catch up to her teammates. At the halfway point, the girls’ team had grabbed the race lead with a team total of 62 points, and continued to push.
Quite a pack at 1.5 mile split!
Carlmont placed two individuals in the top five finishers, giving their fans a lot of excitement at the finish line. Sylvana and Triya had passed roughly a half dozen runners each in the back half of the race and together with Sarah finished 6-7-8 with times of 19:12, 19:24 and 19:29. Sanjana (19:51) and Jannah (19:53) finished the scoring at 14 and 16, with Monta Vista’s top five all under 20 minutes at Toro for the first time since 2014. Claire came in with a 20:20 and Lauren at 21:08, and Monta Vista had won the CCS championship for only the second time in the history of our school.
Claire, Triya, Sanjana, Sarah, Sylvana and Jannah all scored PRs, with Sarah’s 57 second PR to get under 20 for the first time a stand out performance. Sylvana’s 19:12 ties Jean Feng’s 2008 mark for the 11th fastest Monta Vista time ever at Toro. The girl’s 97:51 team time trails only the 2014 team on the Monta Vista all time list. Jannah’s mark makes her the third fastest Monta Vista freshman ever at Toro, trailing only Jenny Xu (who absolutely loved racing at Toro) and Kelly Bishop. Those three are the only three Monta Vista freshmen to break 20 minutes at Toro.
Results are up on XCStats.
There are also some interesting results information provided by Record Timing. These are a sometimes hard to navigate and find what you want, but there are some interesting team and individual split information and other fun stuff.
Mr. Ma has lots of good photos posted also.
On To The State Championships
With only five days separating the CCS race and the State Championship meet, the Varsity girls team spent most of the week with some light jogging, rest and recovery with a brief and fast workout on Wednesday. At the Silicon Valley Turkey Trot on Thursday, many MVXC ran in either the 5km (Ananya Rajagopal, Eric Wang, John McNelis) or the 10km (Rachel Jiang, Darren Yang, Kyle Tsujimoto, Ellie Hsu, Jason Yip, Anoushka Lakshmi, Vivian Lau, Coach Flatow, and probably others). There were also many MVXC alumni out running (Bridget Gottlieb, Julia Chang, Kyle Ettinger, Jason Tsujimoto, Rohan Choudhury, Vamsee Vemulapalli, Akshay Thontakudi, Jenny and Jeffrey Xu, Yu Hsiao, and I’m sure others I forgot) as well as current and alumni parents (Xus, Sheriff family, Tsujimotos, Gottliebs, and others. It was incredibly fun and gratifying to see how many MVXC current and former runners were out at the Turkey Trot, as well as families…and I was out in the cold for a solid hour and half after the race catching up! Next year, Coach Johnson and I are talking about planting an MV flag as a rally point and bringing out coffee and hot chocolate for everyone after the Turkey Trot…
During the week, California finally got some rain! Rain helped clear the air of smoke and more importantly for people in Northern California, helped put out the Camp Fire that destroyed Paradise.
We got to Fresno at noon on Friday to check in, and under threatening gray skies we had a shake out run on the course. The course was in fantastic shape, only a couple of mildly muddy spots and the air crystal clear. Even the shake out runs at the State Meet are exciting…all the teams are running around in matching team gear, they all look happy and a tiny bit anxious, and they all look very fast. Watching all the other teams jog around highlights what we have accomplished by qualifying for this meet. The California State Meet is truly the Olympics for high school runners. We headed off to dinner and our hotel in high spirits for the finals on Saturday morning.
Up early, breakfast, and off for our 9:30 race. There was mist on the windows as I drove on the freeway, but on the course it just felt cool and a little damp—perfect for competing. We got ourselves warmed up and found box 2B and were ready for our 9:30am start.
At the one mile split, Monta Vista was 21st out of 22 teams. Triya and Sylvana were rolling along in 109th and 110th place, with Jannah close behind; to give you an idea of how competitive the California D1 girls , Sarah was only 10 seconds back yet that 10 seconds had 40 girls packing into the space. There were serious moves about to happen. In the next mile, Triya, Sylvana and Jannah passed about two-dozen competitors each, and Sarah added a dozen, as the team dropped almost 70 points. Over the final mile, Sylvana passed another 37 girls, Triya chipped in 35 and Jannah added 20 as the team knocked off 90 more points and moved past 9 more teams to finish in 10thplace! This was one of the most exciting finishes you can imagine for a cross country meet.
Monta Vista finished in the top 10 for the first time at the State meet. Only a couple other CCS teams—the Bellarmine and St. Frnacis boys—had higher finishes than the MVXC girls (7th and 5th for those two schools) The 96:58 team time was Monta Vista’s second fastest mark all-time, trailing only the 2013 squad. Jannah, Triya, Lauren and Sanjana all had personal records. Sylvana and Triya became the fourth and fifth Monta Vista runners to ever break 19 at Woodward Park, joining MVXC legends Bridget Gottlieb, Jenny Xu and Kelly Bishop. Jannah has the third fastest mark ever for an MV freshman.
Awesome way for a truly wonderful senior class to end a last cross country season. I’m very grateful for this entire team, and I already am missing the seniors. The next six months will go by all too fast.
Here are the XCStats results.
There are also some interesting results information provided by Record Timing. These are a sometimes hard to navigate and find what you want, but there are some interesting team and individual split information and other fun stuff.
Looking Forward
In interviews about what it takes to succeed, high achievers often talk about commitment, rather than intensity. What comes up again and again in their remarks is the idea of consistency over time.
~Angela Duckworth, Grit
This was a great finish to the 2018 season—and while we look back with a lot of satisfaction and joy, I can’t help but also look forward with a lot of optimism. We are getting six of our top seven boys back from the team that ran at CCS. While the girls lose four of our seven starters, three of our five scoring runners at both CCS and State are coming back next Fall. Both boys’ and girls’ first alternates are freshmen. We are really well positioned to reload and be back next year. All it takes is the same grit and perseverance that our team culture features. We start now with consistent effort. I’m always excited about our team’s possibilities and 2019 will be another exciting year. Invite your friends and ask others to join us! MCVX is truly a great team.
Track is also going to be exciting. This year the track team is returning CCS championship meet qualifiers in the 100, 200, 400, 3200 as well as the entire 4×400 team and ¾ of the 4×100 team that were in the finals. There are plenty of scoring opportunities for our team at CCS…who knows what could happen with our team in 2019!
Reflections
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
-from Invictus by William Ernest Henley
After a season that had rolled along like running on a known path in Fremont Older Open Space, the end of the season gave us the running equivalent of washed out trail that we had to negotiate. Recent research shows that people tend to be more conscious of and give more weight in our minds and attention to obstacles we face—our ‘headwinds’. People also give less credit and less value to our strengths, the benefits we have and the breaks we get— our ‘tailwinds’ that push us forward. It would have been easy for the MVXC boys and girls to check out and give up, or self-handicap, when we were hit by the headwinds of smoky air and workout disruption. We could have phoned in our effort at CCS and the result would have been subpar performances in our final races. Instead, our athletes took to heart all the things that went right for us and the advantages we had (supportive groups and parent/teammate drivers that allowed us to keep training, our good fortune in running Toro in September at the Chieftain Invitational when many schools did not, a solid season of training, an abundance of grit). This focus on our advantages, gifts and everything that went right for us allowed us to maintain a positive attitude all week, helped us address problems optimistically, and had us ready both physically and mentally for our races. We all got on the line committed and ready to do our best–and we did.
Everyone in their life will have unexpected and often seemingly unfair obstacles thrown at them. No one can avoid having the unexpected problem occur. How we respond determines what happens next. Do we rise to meet these challenges the best we can? Or do we let the problems overwhelm us and carry us away from our goals? My hope as a coach that loves you all, is that the memory of these last couple of weeks and the way our boys and girls responded so well to these challenges will help face other problems in the future. Running is probably not the way we will earn our living (I can attest to that!) , but maybe this season will give us tools to be more successful, resilient and gritty throughout our lives.
Thank you all for a great season. It is a gift for Coach Johnson and me to coach this team. You are all our kids, and we are proud of you.
