Week Eight of the Monta Vista cross country season–the last week of September–was a challenging, hard week for those that attacked it with vigor. We were looking for three kinds of quality–CV pace, threshold pace, and long steady hills with two long runs. That’s a lot of work! And it takes a lot of drive and grit for an athlete to tackle it all and not try to avoid the discomfort. MVXC was up to the task.
The CV pace work, looking to develop both our ability to process lactate and increase our maximum oxygen uptake, was repeat 800s on the track. Coach focussed on two highlights in the results from this workout. First, there were many people who were running almost as fast, or even faster, CV paces at 800m than they were at 400m last month! Just start alphabetically: Valerie Ayzenberg ran 12 400s on August 18 and averaged 95 seconds per rep, and on September 26 she averaged 3:16 for seven 800s–so she only slowed down by three seconds per lap, while doubling the length of the interval, and adding 800m to her volume. All that in just one month of hard work! Next up alphabetically, Juliana Banes marks were 2:45/4:30, so her pace was even faster for the 800s than the 400s! This is one of the great things about distance running…there are objective measurements that you can record and compare and use to see your improvements. And if you work hard, you will improve!
The other highlight, a highlight that coach talked about with the team on Tuesday, was ‘tacking on’. Coach had asked for six reps on Monday but left the door open to do more. When Valerie finished her sixth rep, she walked over to coach and asked, ‘is it crazy to do a seventh?’ Coach said, ‘not for you, Valerie!’ and she proceeded to throw down her second fastest rep of the session. On the drive home Coach got on the phone with his friend Josh Cox to tell him about that little incident and the two of them got each other all worked up about tacking on and how great tacking on can be. Coach looked over the records when he got home and it turned out that several more athletes had also tacked on…so there were a few more grit recognition shirts handed out to Valerie, Tanay, Soham, Darren and Gene after they tacked on extra reps during Monday’s CV workout!
The rest of the week included Up and Over (with Coach still yelping about tacking on Garrods), a Palm threshold run, and Horse + Garrods, as well as helping Kennedy host an XC meet. Of course during the back half of the week, Coach Flatow went AWOL, left the team in the capable hands of Coach Curtis and Coach Johnson, then he headed back East to Philadelphia and…
The Paul Short Run
What does a cross country coach do when he takes a few days off? This cross country coach flew across the United States…to watch cross country.
I had heard about the Paul Short Run since 2014. The Paul Short Run has been hosted by Lehigh University for 48 years in Allentown, Pennsylvania, in the countryside north of Philadelphia. Bridget Gottlieb (MV 2014) ran her 6km PR at Paul Short, and declared this one of her favorite cross country courses anywhere. Julia Chang (MV 2015) and Paru Meyyappan (MV 2017) also ran for their colleges and raved about that invitational.
So, when Triya Roy (MV 2020) was set to run at Paul Short, I finally said to myself, ‘life is too short!’ and headed back, with the help of Coach Johnson and Coach Curtis who watched over the team while I was traveling. Bridget and I drove up for the race, we also saw Sylvana Northrop (MV 2021) (we yelled to her warming up, and cheered for her during the race, but could not find the UCSD camp afterwards), we took Triya and her roommate Kaiti to dinner in Philadelphia afterwords, we caught up with Angela Duckworth too…all in all, a great weekend!
Link to Johns Hopkins at Paul Short including results links.
Next Up
We have races at Crystal Springs on October 4 (you have to arrange your own transportation for Crystal; for all weekday meets, we are allowing you to figure out what is the best time to leave school so that you are at your race on time and miss the minimum amount of school), and at Pacific Grove on Saturday the 8th. The Crystal and Pacific Grove meet sheets are both posted.
Random Photos of Paul Short, etc…
