“The most important thing in the Olympic Games is not to win but to take part, just as the most important thing in life is not the triumph but the struggle. The essential thing is not to have conquered but to have fought well.”
–The Olympic Creed
Competing at an invitational like Stanford that recruits and accepts the best athletes from across the country is an honor. It’s worthwhile to think about the Olympic creed as we prepare and evaluate our performances.
Our girls DMR team of Triya Roy, Bianca Young, Anjali Thontakudi and Sarah Feng joined a crowded field of some of the best distance programs on the West Coast, including Santa Cruz and Mari Friedman, Great Oak, Oak Ridge and the Denner twins, and St. Francis of Sacramento and Sydney Vandergriff, and others. Our girls got out hard and fought well and finished with a solid 14th place between Menlo-Atherton and Long Beach.
Monta Vista’s second team was the boys’ 4x400m relay of Eliot Lubomirsky, Peter Heydinger, Justin Lin and Jason Tsujimoto. This group has a tough act to follow after the CCS podium squad from 2017, yet our boys were less than two seconds off of last year’s performance at Stanford. We certainly have something to build upon after our 3:35 clocking on Saturday!
We don’t have to walk into every competition thinking ‘we could win this thing’ in order to do well. Like the Olympics, sometimes the essential thing is to truly take part–not just go through the motions, but put our hearts into the effort to do our best. The essential thing is the struggle, in all our lives. We don’t need to walk into every class thinking ‘I need to get the best grade of anyone in this class’, it’s usually going to be more productive (and less stressful) if our approach is ‘I want to learn a lot in this class’ or ‘I want to give my best effort here’ or ‘I wonder what I’m going to learn this semester?’ If we are accepted to Harvard, we don’t need to go to Harvard thinking ‘I am going to be the most brilliant student here’. What we could be doing is thinking, ‘I wonder what this experience is going to be like? I can’t wait to find out!’ or ‘What can I learn from this experience, what can I take from this experience, how can I get the most out of this experience?’. Most of the time, if we give our best effort, we will get something valuable back that we did not expect. I saw that from MVTF18 once again this weekend at Stanford.
Complete results are posted and there are photos of the entire event (not only Monta Vista athletes) posted here.
Monta Vista DMR team chatting with Emma Seyer, MVTF/MVXC 2014 and current member of the UC Berkeley track & field team. The next day, Emma won the women’s collegiate hammer throw competition while setting a new personal record.
