Stanford Invitational Report

Monta Vista Cross Country drove up the road to the Stanford Invitational yesterday, competing in one of the most competitive and prestigious races in the country.  More than 2,500 runners from over 200 high schools and colleges from across the country competed on the beautiful Stanford golf course (which looked a little better before thousands of runners and fans spent a day trampling the fairways!).

Monta Vista sent fourteen runners to compete in two races, girls and boys Division 1-Varsity.  Monta Vista’s varsity representatives included seven Stanford ‘rookies’—runners who had never seen the Stanford course before, or experienced running on a cross-country course laid out entirely on grass.  Three of our runners were Freshmen (Jenny Xu, Julia Chang, and Emilio Torres-Gonzalez), so they were running in a ‘big’ high school XC invitational as their second race ever in a MV uniform.  That’s a lot of pressure!

The coaches were proud of all of our athletes!  Three runners (Kirsten Do, Takuto Doshiro and Ryan Bishop) ran Stanford course PRs.  Pearl Law, Risako Tanida, and Emilio all made the most of their first time at Stanford, running really smart races—going out under control and moving up the entire race, passing a lot of runners during the last half of the 5km course.

The outstanding individual performance of the day was Jenny, who finished 7^th in the D1 girls’ race.  Her time of 18:49.9 was the fastest time every run by a Monta Vista girl on the Stanford course, and Jenny was the first MV girl to ever break 19 minutes!  Outstanding run!

The boy’s team ended up with a 13^th place in D1 boys, and finished 60^th out of 169 schools overall on the day.  The girls finished 15^th in D1 and 65^th of 143 overall.

The girls had a big improvement over 2010; the aggregate time of the top 5 runners in 2011 was 103 minutes and 19 seconds, more than 7 minutes faster than the 2010 team’s time.

There are photos from Stanford up in the MVRunning Gallery.

Complete results are at: http://www.rtspt.com/events/stanford/xcinvite11/

This coming week we have the first SCVAL cluster on Tuesday at the Central Park Invite; see the schedule for the Meet Sheet.  On Saturday, Monta Vista travels to Half Moon Bay for the Artichoke Invitational.  We hope to see you there!

Congratulations again, team, on a great effort at Stanford!

Stanford Times for MV Runners

5km course