Monta Vista Cross Country drove to the Pacific Coast on October 2, ready to compete in the 50th Annual Artichoke Invitational. While it might strain belief, Coach Flatow was a competitor in the 5th Artichoke Invitational in 1976 (how did they figure out runners’ times back in 1976? Hourglass? Waterclock?). This race has been going on a long time and has a rich history, with some of the best athletes in NorCal on the course record list.
The frosh-soph girls lead the team out on a beautiful Saturday afternoon, with Vera Bondar leading the team in with a 19:20. Vera continues to improve, with her 8:18 per mile pace more than a full minute per mile faster than the season opener at Lagoon Valley only a month before (and Artichoke is a longer race, too!). Manasi Prasad was close behind and she also knocked more than a minute off her pace from Lagoon Valley, with Raje Kenyan, Siran Gao and Sudipti Dantuluri wrapping up the team scoring. For the frosh-soph boys, Denny Dong went outran the rest of the field, winning the race outright, with Ruhaan Shah, Tanay Parikh, Brandon Xu and Ethan Lu in a 20 second pack. Denny’s time is the 5th fastest of any Monta Vista sophomore, all-time. The MVXC boys took fifth place as a team, and if the chase pack of four and the rest continue to move up, the group could put a scare into a lot of teams!
The JV girls showed off MVXC depth and pretty much dominated the team race. Margaux Francoeur came back to racing and gave MVXC it’s second individual champion, winning with a 16:29 mark. Avani Kalari, Anika Bhandarkar, Valerie Ayzenberg, Sophia Chen, Karena Lai, Megan Nieh, Sandhya Fasnacht and Jasmine Varma all took home medals to go with a team victory! In the JV boys race, Nitin Kukreja followed up his SAT session with a fast race to snag a medal himself. Jannah Sheriff’s 15:12 mark tied multiple-time-State-meet-qualifier Anna Hsiao for 10th on the Monta Vista all-time list, good for an 8th place finish on the day, while Vivian Lau, Sydney Stevens, Ellie Hsu and Agnes Wang all earned hardware as the girls took third place in the large school varsity race. Justin Yu had a nice 12:41 time as he finished in 9th place, with Andrew Cole, Alex Nguyen, Ari Rajaram and Matthew Sun again completing the boys’ top 5 group, finishing in 7th place as a team.
Combined for all races, Justin was 13th out of 595 boys that raced on Saturday, while Jannah was the 13th fastest girl all day. The girls’ team took an impressive 6th out of 29 teams, while the boys were 9th. Denny Dong and Ruhann Shah both were in the boys’ top seven times, competing from the FS race.
None of our athletes had run this course before Saturday, so there were no PR opportunities (though Ellie had fallen asleep in the stands while waiting for her older brother to finish racing in 2017). We can note that Agnes, Anika, Avani, Ellie, Jannah, Joey, Karena, Margaux, Megan, Nerea, Samhita, Siran, Sudipti, Sydney, Valerie, Vera, Vivian, Andrew, Ari, Darren, Denny, both Ethans, Jayden, Justin, Matt, Neal, Nitin, Paru, Ruhan, Seshanth, Soti, Vedant and William all had their fastest pace for any race all season–a sign that there are good things happening!
And…it’s hard to beat pizza on the beach after a cross country meet. There are few things better in life.
Complete results are posted on Lynbrook. Agnes posted some nice photos, that are all free to download.
Next, see you at Crystal Springs for the SCVAL Crystal Preview on October 5.
