Monta Vista Cross Country runners certainly felt at home at the Artichoke Invitational on October 4! We rolled into Half Moon Bay and in five races recorded this haul:
>Three championships (Girls’ Varsity, Boys Frosh-Soph, and Girls Junior Varsity)
>A runner-up (Girls’ Frosh-Soph, missing the championship by only one point!)
>A third place (Boys’ Varsity)
It was an impressive showing by all our teams, bringing back two plaques and around 40 medals!
Even more impressive than the hardware was the improvement shown by our team. Of 36 runners who ran the Half Moon Bay course last year, 31 runners had improvements–86% of our athletes improved from year to year! That is amazing and a tribute to the hard work that they put into their sport. Among the boys, both Wayne Shu and Aidan Gottlieb dropped more than two minutes year-to-year, as did Jae Youn Lee among the girls. Two minute improvement on a 2.33 mile course is a huge jump, and that does not happen without hard work–congratulations Wayne, Aidan and Jae Youn!
Other individual highlights include Rohan Choudhury’s win in the Varsity boys’ large school race; Rohan’s 12:05 was not only the winning time, it was the fastest time all day and the 12th fastest all-time on the HMB course (which makes this a new Monta Vista school record, too!). Robin Stodieck’s 14:43 was the fifth fastest time among the frosh-soph boys, yet Robin’s race was critical; as the fifth man in, Robin was 27 places in front of Modesto’s fifth runner, and that was the difference as the Monta Vista boys moved from 3rd place to 1st place based on fifth runners, outpacing Modesto’s team by only 14 points! Every runner does matter, the FSB race is another example of how every point and every place can matter when we are fighting for championships. Among the girls, Jenny Xu’s 14:26 was the second among girls in the large school Varsity race, and our entire girls’ varsity team–Jenny, Kelly Bishop, Julia Chang, Maddy Yip, Anna Hsiao, Christina Jennings and Namrata Subramanian–all medalled, finishing in the top 25.
We could go on and on about many great performances by individuals and teams…it was a day that everyone really shined!
And afterwards, we hit the beach, continuing a three year tradition…thank you to Rohan, Rhea, Sanjna and Namrata’s parents who helped plan the beach party and picnic food!
Complete results and analysis are available on XCStats.
Lots of photos are available for viewing and downloading on the team Picasa site.
