Watermelon Run

Monta Vista Cross Country held the annual Watermelon Run on September 29, and the team showed once again that 2013 could be another special year–and not only because the team was able to demolish 16 watermelons!

The Watermelon Run is not so much a time trial as it is a chance to run hard again, and start remembering what it feels like to race before we head down to Salinas.  We get a chance to practice our pre-race routines, remember what it feels like to pace ourselves, and start to look inside ourselves and see what we have available.  MVXC13 passed this little event with flying colors.  Our team looked great, top to bottom.

The coaches don’t look at the times we record to find any deep meaning, but we do look for trends.  MVXC13 compares very well to past years’ MV teams.  For our top 5 boys, we are right in the middle of the combined times since 2006, and not all that far from our best teams over that time.  The boys shine when it comes to the 5th runner–in only two prior years was the 5th runner faster, and never by much.  The 5th runner matters a lot in scoring a cross country race.  Consider this–in the girls D1 sectional race last year, the difference between 30th place and 70th place was one minute.  If a team’s 5th runner improves by a minute, that’s potentially 40 points!  So…the message to the team is, help encourage all our runners to continue to improve! And the message to the front runners, if you want to have your team do well and gp far, during practice help the four through ten and other runners to get up with you and improve.  It’s not just about 1 and 2, if our 3 through 15 runners continue to push and we continue to help them pull, who knows who will emerge to help us later in the season?

The girls were ridiculous.  Best combined time for the first 5 runners for any year as far back as I have data.  Our 10th girl this year would have been right at the front four and five years ago.  We thought we had added wrong the figures were so good.  Keep pulling together, ladies, you are looking strong!

WATERMELON RUN HISTORY 2006-2013

About 2/3 of the runners who ran this year and last year improved, some significantly.  Vamsee, Akshay, Yuji and David Wang all improved by more than one minute; Bridget, Justin and Isabel all improved by more than two minutes; and Hannah Ho and Ching Pan both dropped their times by more than three minutes over their prior year.  The biggest drop was recorded by sophomore Connor Sullivan, who improved his time by an incredible five minutes and four seconds!  Your coaches consider a year over year improvement on an ~5km course of 30 seconds to a minute being a reasonable goal–but as these athletes have demonstrated, it is possible to exceed that amount by a lot!

Several athletes recorded improvements for multiple years.  David Wang, Kevin Krause, John Hsiao, Rohan Choudhury, and Miranda Chen all have improved their Watermelon Run times both this year and last year (Sanjna and Ismael were both within seconds of doing this also, and considering the accuracy of our timing system, they probably did achieve this goal!).  And senior Bridget Gottlieb has improved her Watermelon time each and every year she ran, a tribute to her long term persistence and ability to keep working away.  Every year does not always the same improvement, of course, that’s the way running works.  Improvement comes in jumps, and we need to keep working for the long term because the next big improvement could be just around the corner.

Great job, everyone!  Next week we start racing for real.  We can’t wait!

Thanks to Pearl Law for the photographs!  More photos are posted in the gallery, and Mr. BenDavid posted more great photos here.

WATERMELON RUN 2013 RESULTS