Thursday, August 26 saw the Monta Vista Cross Country team renew the season opening Watermelon Run tradition!
More than 20 years ago, before the current coaching staff took over MVXC, the team started running the 2.6 Watermelon as the season opening time trial. This is a challenging course, a real cross country test, not a tame run around a track or school grounds. There is dirt and there are hills! And our team embraces the challenge.
Top finishers in 2021 were senior Justin Yu for the boys and junior Nikhita Saldi for the ladies. Justin clearly invested effort over the summer, and the results showed, as his 15:24 time gave him almost a full minute personal record, and was the 9th fastest mark all-time! Justin is in fast company with runners who had wonderful seasons after their top-ten finishes. Nikhita also had a top-ten all time mark on the 2.6 mile course, with her 17:40 clocking matching Julia Chang for 8th all-time (Julia went on to run for the Johns Hopkins cross country team and is now in the UCLA PhD program for Chemistry). Nikhita has been working hard and building upon her CCS championship track meet appearance in the 3200m last June.
There were many other noteworthy results. Margaux Francoeur posted a 20:05, which is the 17th all-time sophomore mark, right between Paru Meyyappan and Sanjana Borle–and both of those girls worked their tails off the next two years, with Paru going on to compete for Carnegie-Mellon University and reaching the NCAA championships (she is now starting her PhD program at UNC-Chapel Hill), while as a senior Sanjana was one of the top runners for MVXC’s 2018 CCS championship squad. Junior Alex Nguyen was the second boy across the line, and his 16:36 was a whopping 2:44 personal record (yes you read that right–two minutes, forty-four seconds!). But that was not even the biggest personal record set…
Alex had one of the nine personal records set (a lower number than usual as only 19 runners had run Watermelon before, in non-pandemic years the team usually has twice the number of opportunities). For the boys, in addition to Alex and Justin’s PRs, Soti Kougiouris (a 7 second PR), Ethan Lam (10 seconds) and Ari Rajaram (his 3:55 PR was the largest improvement for any of the boys) had PRs while for the girls, Insiah Kizilbash (an 11 minute PR!), Meena Kolli (1:40) and Agnes Wang (1:02) joined Nikhita (3:46!). Here is the thing to keep in mind…work hard, stay focused, be gritty and amazing improvements are possible. Improvements are not guaranteed, and progress is often not linear, but progress will come if you stick with your passions and work diligently and intelligently. Believe! You can have improvements like this, or follow in Julia’s or Paru’s footsteps, or whatever your passion and your path might be.
And afterwards…as much Watermelon as anyone could eat (more than a dozen slices were recorded by a few athletes!) and a share circle.
Check out the complete results at XCStats. Mr Ma was there to take photos, so check back here and will have a link to really good, downloadable photos.
(Aren’t we glad that we pulled the Watermelon Run to an earlier day in the season? The next day, the AQI went above 150! Don’t put things off is a good motto anytime…)
