I am far behind on MVXC news updates…I apologize! Here are some quick notes to get us caught up…
SCVALs:
Yes, this happened almost a month ago, but let’s not forget to honor our three all-league runners! Alongside your 2024 Varsity Girls’ De Anza League Champion, Anika Bhandarkar, both Miranda Hsu and Tanay Parish earned Varsity All-League honors. The Varsity Boys’ and JV Boys’ teams both finished in fifth place, while the Varsity Girls’ team secured third. Impressively, 30 out of 43 Monta Vista runners set new personal records (PRs) on the Crystal Springs course! Complete results are posted here.
CCS:
We had great performances at CCS, and almost came home with hardware…both Miranda Hsu and Tanay took 8th place in their races, only one spot off the podium, while the girls team finished in fifth place, only 10 points from fourth. Great ends to the season with wonderful efforts by both teams! Tanay has advanced to the State meet while five more runners set personal bests.
Awards Banquet:
Thanks to the efforts of a large group of parents, we had a wonderful awards banquet again this year–this was one of the best ever! A copy of the slide deck is available as a download here. The 2024 MVXC award recipients were:
Most Outstanding Runners
Anika Bhandarkar
and
Tanay Parikh
Outstanding First-Year Runners
Riu Yamada
and
Naomi Hsu
Most Inspirational Runners
Miranda Hsu
and
Ryan Liu
Most Improved Runners
Ethan Yang
and
Myra Mishra
Coaches’ Award
Anika Bhandarkar
The Spirit of Running
Katherine Lee
and
Suhani Pahuja
Holiday Lunch and Winter Training:
We had pumpkin pie for a pre-Thanksgiving lunch, watched a video about the Dark Peak Fell Runners, and discussed winter training. The slide deck for winter training, and the individual planning worksheet, are available here as downloads.
I encourage you to create a training plan for yourself—this could even be a group project with your training partners. You can develop a plan where you work together to improve individually while supporting each other in reaching your training goals. If you’d like, send me your plan, and I’ll provide feedback. Sharing your plan with me and your partners also helps strengthen your commitment to your goals!
Turkey Trot:
We had so many athletes, parents, and alumni come Trot on Thanksgiving morning! A partial list includes Anika Bhandarkar (second in her age group in the 5km), Melinda Zhao, Sam Heinonen and his parents, Riu Yamada, Jenny Xu (MIT) (age group champion in the 10km), Triya Roy (Johns Hopkins) (10km age group champion, and a new 10km PR), Rohan Choudhury (CalTech and Carnegie-Mellon), Abhijit Choudhury, Akshara Majjiga (UC Berkeley), Andrew Liu, Becca Zheng, Tanmoy Roy, Jannah Sheriff, Tarun Gandhi, Rhea Choudhury (USC, MIT), Kirsten Do (Parsons), Darren Do, Katie Li (University of Illinois), Ian Gee, Jeffrey Xu (UC Irvine), Jill McDonough, Claire Ettinger, David Wang (MIT), Sandhya Fastnacht (Carnegie-Mellon), and Vivian Cheng (SJSU) and I know I missed many more!
State Meet:
Tanay made his last race count, running a 16:14 at the California State Championships for the fastest 5 km in his four year career with MVXC. It was a wonderful day of racing and a great way to wrap the 2024 season!
Downloads
