On Saturday, September 27, Monta Vista made itself known–loudly!–at the Stanford Invitational.
There were 227 teams with 2,502 athletes from all over North America–schools from Texas, New York, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington, Canada as well as the best schools across California. Only one other school brought as many runners–28–as Monta Vista did!
The Monta Vista boys had the 83rd fastest team time of the day, while fielding one of the youngest teams. To give you an example, in the D1 race there were 22 freshman in the entire race and Monta Vista fielded two of them–10% of the total! While competing in a major invitational like Stanford can be intimidating for a sophomore or freshman, the experience can be valuable–when the runner comes back in two years as a junior or senior they are competing against runners coming to Stanford for the first time. One thing about cross country running and distance running, which we have said again and again…the best runners are the ones that show persistence and work over a long period of time. Most runners drop off at some point; those that persist will improve and get further and further forward in the pack. We think that many of our runners were inspired by the great atmosphere and competition at Stanford.
Individually, Rohan recorded a 15:56, good for 38th in the seeded race and a 1:23 PR! Brent ran an excellent 16:41 on the 5km course. Both Rohan and Brent’s times made the all-time Monta Vista list for Stanford!
The girls’ team had a fabulous day, with our top 7 finishing a remarkable 6th place in the seeded race, ahead of teams like Houston Memorial, Punahou and Grant (Oregon). The girls’ team time was the second fastest of any CCS team at Stanford. Our second 7 girls were matched against 30 first team varsity girls from all over the country–and they took 20th, amazing! Every girl who was repeating at Stanford recorded PRs, with Jenny, Maddy and Julia all dropping more than a minute from 2012. Jenny, Maddy, Julia and Kelly were all in the top 50 individuals in the seeded race, and these four plus Christina Jennings and Paru will all be added to the all-time Monta Vista Stanford record book! .
Afterwards, we ran into downtown Palo Alto and demolished some pretty good Chicago style pizza!
Congrats, everyone, on a great day…keep it up, the best is yet to come!
Complete results are available at XCStats or at Lynbrook.
There are lots of good photos available to download at the Piacasa team website.
