The first race of the Santa Clara Valley Athletic League series was on Tuesday, September 21 at Baylands park in Sunnyvale. It felt so good to have a SCVAL race that felt like 2019. Welcome back!
The Baylands course is a 5km track on the edge of the San Francisco Bay. While it is not particularly scenic and it does not have challenging hills, the Baylands course is a REAL cross country course–this is not a trip around Los Gatos or Homestead high school! And seeing a REAL cross country start, with athletes from 14 schools crowding the starting line, on that big grassy field is really a treat.
Because the course does not easily allow a race to begin while runners from the prior race are competing, the varsity races started first. The varsity boys lead off and Justin Yu again paced the group, with a 17:30 that was a full minute quicker than the last time he ran Baylands in 2019. Alex, Denny, Andrew and Ari were the other scoring members for the varsity boys as they finished in 8th place. For the girls, Nikhita Saldi put up a 19:47 mark that was good for 8th place, and is also the 4th best Baylands mark in history for a Monta Vista girl! Jannah, Vivian, Ellie and Sydney sped in to give the varsity girls a 4th place finish.
While the JV boys did not have a complete team, Ethan Lam lead our boys with a 21:56 and Amogh Rajagopal continued his strong showing with a two minute course PR. The JV girls notched the highest team placement of the day, as Valerie Ayzenberg took 5th with her 23:27 and was followed by Megan, Jasmine, Sandhya and Karena to take a second place team finish behind a strong Palo Alto squad. The frosh-soph boys’ race wrapped up the day with Brandon Xu and Tanay Parikh coming in close together, with Ruhaan, Neal and Ethan Lu completing the scoring as the team took 9th place.
The times from this first Baylands race are hard to judge, because in addition to this being the hottest day of racing we have had so far, MVXC had raced only three days before at De La Salle. The team had discussed using this race as an opportunity to experiment with race strategies as well as to refine our race preparation. Baylands was our first afternoon race, and in six weeks we will be lining up for the League Championships in the afternoon. Baylands was a good race to take some chances and learn a bit and hone our approach. Nevertheless, with all these different factors, MVXC still had quite a few personal records: For the boys Ari, Denny and Soti had PRs as well as Amogh’s new best time, and the girls saw Sandhya, Jasmine, Megan, Insiah, Sophia, Valerie and Nikhita all set best marks.
While the De La Salle meet was only three days earlier, impressively there were five athletes who ran the two mile distance on Saturday and had a faster pace on a 5km course on Tuesday: Darren, Aaron (the two boys ran together for much of the race), Vera, Sandhya, and Siran! There is no change in fitness in a couple days, so if an athlete runs FARTHER and also FASTER that usually means they are becoming a little more ‘comfortable with being uncomfortable’. Learning to tolerate some discomfort in racing, training, or pursuit of a challenging goal of any sort, is so important–and not just for runners.
Complete results are posted on XCStats and Lynbrook. Malcolm Slaney, the father of a former Paly runner, was also out taking photos (which are free to download).
MVXC will be back in action on Saturday, October 2, as the team will travel to Half Moon Bay high school for the Artichoke Invitational. Athletes and families will need to arrange their own travel to Half Moon Bay (athletes will be on many different schedules, with SAT and Homecoming as well as different return times, with about 20 athletes heading to the beach after the races).
