Watermelon 2014

Monta Vista Cross Country athletes have been working hard all summer—and they got to show off their fancy new legs and lungs in the annual Watermelon Run on Thursday, September 28!

The Watermelon Run is a true rust-buster, a chance to run hard and get used to race pace again.  We practice our pre-race routines, are reminded what race-pace feels like, and get a chance to see what our engines are ready to do.  The team passed this rust-buster with flying colors!

Your coaches don’t look at the results for any great messages, but we do try to look for trends and indicators to see how we are doing.   We are pretty excited as we look at the figures!

The boys’ team-time of 80:54 is pretty consistent with the last few years, and that is a big achievement considering that we are turning over more than half of last years’ varsity team!  Several boys are stepping up big time, and their work showed with big improvements—Bennett and Jake both recorded jaw-dropping improvements of more than three minutes from last year, and Tyler’s 16:59 was  impressive.   Rohan led the group with a 14:43—the fastest time since 2010, and the second fastest time since 2006!  And our future continues to look strong—eight freshmen and sophomores went under 20, just like last year!

Rohan Choudhury completed an impressive feat—he improved his time trial mark every year; 17:10 as a freshman, 15:48 as a soph, 15:27 last year and a 14:45 this year!  Rohan’s consistent work ethic and focus and constant improvement is remarkable.  Physiologically, boys (usually) are maturing during high school and runners don’t peak physically until age 25 to 32, so physically it should be more common for boys to improve every year; what is less common is the mental focus and work ethic and desire to continually improve over a period of years.

The girls’ team has been working diligently all summer, and their team time broke the record set by last year’s team by almost a minute!    Joanne dropped the most time year to year with a 2:24 improvement, and Namrata, Jenny and Julia improved more than a minute from already strong times!  Last year there were nine girls under 21 minutes, and this year there were 12 girls at 21 minutes or better, including freshman Akshara Majjiiga!  Depth wins championships and lots of our kids are working to improve, at every level—really adding to great team strength.  I really believe that team success builds from the bottom as well as from the top, with everyone working together to improve and succeed.

A shout out the newcomers—our new boys Derek, Atharva, Mikey and our new girls Akshara, Mitzuke, Megan, and all of the TWENTY new freshman who ran this year really looked great, both as runners and as teammates.  We are glad to have our new freshman class as part of the MVXC family—they are going to go far!

Running is a sport that rewards hard work—there is no such thing as getting lucky in distance running!  Spend some time talking to the kids that made jumps from last year and see what they did over the summer, and my guess is that they put in some solid work to achieve their goals.

Following the run, the team demolished 13 watermelons in impressive fashion!  Those poor watermelons never saw us coming.

Great start to the season, everyone!  If you had a great, run, cool, keep it up!  If you are a little dissatisfied, well, remember this is just a rust-buster.  Figure out what you can learn from that run, figure out what you want to learn from the day, decide the work you want to focus on the rest of the season—then take that race memory, wad it up, toss it out and move on!

All right!

On to Earlybird, everyone!

Results are below, and we have downloadable photos on our Picasa site.

(Thanks to all the alumni who helped out with the event:  John Hsiao, Vikrant Marathe, Archit Dua, Anand Rao, Kevin Bishop and Emma Seyer!  It was great seeing all of you, and hearing how well you are all doing at college!  John got a nice workout himself, running in Rohan, Jenny and several of the other runners!)

WATERMELON RUN HISTORY

2014 WATERMELON RUN RESULTS