Hot Watermelon!

The temperature on Watermelon day:

2013:  78°

2014:  77°

2015:  88°

2016:  75°

2017:  95°

Yikes.

Yes, it was a difficult day for the Watermelon Run, yet MVXC rose to the challenge and with zero complaining (beyond a few accurate comments that man, the air feels heavy) we did get our practice competition in.

Thursday was a tough day.  Yet our athletes were pretty smart and we avoided major issues.  And, some athletes had very impressive days, circumstances or not.  Jeffrey Xu was the first runner in with a stellar 15:17 mark, the fourth fastest mark on the Stevens Canyon course this decade on what was certainly the hottest day!  Jeffrey’s mark was a 27 second PR for Jeffrey and the second consecutive improvement; Jeffrey ran 16:41 as a sophomore in his first season on MVXC, 15:44 as a junior and now his 15:17 as a senior.  Once more, we have an example of hard and consistent effort over a long period of time leading to really good results!

For the girls, junior Sanjana Borle set the pace with an 18:50 mark.  Sanjana withstood the high temperatures to score a 1:16PR and a ninth best mark for the decade.  Last year, Sanjana finished as our top JV runner and first alternate on our varsity section and state representative teams, and this season she looks determined to move up and be a major contributor to the varsity’s efforts to return to State for the fifth year in a row!  Good work, Sanjana.

Sylvana Northrop paced the freshman girls with a 20:17 mark, while Rohun Agrawal paced the boys with a 17:33.  Sylvana’s mark was the 9th all-time for freshmen, right between her current teammates Sarah Feng and Anjali Thontakudi’s frosh times on Stevens Canyon.

Ria Kolli had the biggest PR of the day, dropping an incredible 4:44 from her freshman season to notch a 24:52 clocking on a day that was 2o° warmer!  Other runners who set personal records despite the weather include:

2017 Watermelon Run PRs

Ria Kolli 4:44 PR

Brian Huang 2:50

Dohyun Kim 2:38

Sricharan Ananta 2:25

William Zhang 2:17

Rohan Puthukudy 2:15

Anjali Thontakudi 1:31

Tyler Liu 1:25

Ethan Guo 1:24

Andrew Tedijanto 1:19

Sanjana Borle 1:16

Jason Tsujimoto 1:02

Kyle Tsujimoto 0:58

Aravind Meyyappan 0:49

Kamyar Moradi 0:43

Serena Geis 0:37

Yash Karandikar 0:30

Jeffrey Xu 0:27

Audrey Cui 0:26

Matthew Gong 0:22

Eric Wang 0:19

Alicia Chen 0:11

Spencer Zou 0:10

Derek Lee 0:05

Anyone who scored a PR should be feeling very good about themselves, but even if you did not improved please don’t be too hard on yourself.  Give yourself a little break because of the hot weather and don’t beat yourself up too much.  Different people respond to hot temperatures in different ways and you can only do so much about that (Alberto Salazar, one of America’s best distance runners for years, never brought home an Olympic medal in part because he was not a good hot-weather runner and got burned by bad fortune in weather on big days).  So…if you did well at Watermelon give yourself a huge pat on the back, and if you struggled, use this as a little inspiration to focus!  That focus and determination might be just what you need to help you to get up on Saturday early and train in the cooler morning.

Following the run we devoured 16 Watermelon after a fruit-ninja demonstration, had the traditional MVXC get-to-know-you circle, and headed home.

Well done, everyone!

Complete results are below, and analysis is at XCStats.

2017 Watermelon Results