Beautiful Morning Running at De La Salle Invitational!

Please get me your releases for our next invitational at Pacific Grove!

MVXC22 finally got to enjoy some near-perfect running weather on Saturday, September 17 at the De La Salle invitational!  Perfect running weather is slightly uncomfortably cool spectating weather, so when Coach Flatow realized that one more layer of clothing might have been nice for coaching, he started thinking that Saturday was going to be a nice day for the athletes.

For De La Salle, MVXC eschewed* the two mile race options and loaded everyone into either the varsity or junior varsity three mile races.  The thinking is that as we get into the heart of the season, the important high school races are all three miles or 5km (yea, yea…Crystal is 2.95.  Ask Coach Flatow about why it is 2.95–he knows the origin story of the Crystal Springs course!).  DLS is a fast invitational anyway, and MVXC muscled up and entered all our athletes in some of the most competitive races of the day.  

Being able to get on the line with the best runners in California, or anywhere for that matter, is one of the things that makes cross country different from almost any other sport.  Cross country results are not defined solely by wins and losses.  In other sports, not every team is going to compete directly against the best.  In football, some teams could not even safely play Serra or Wilcox this year without having a big chunk of their teams injured.  For sure, there is no high school football team that could get on the field with a professional team and not be destroyed.  It’s hard to figure out what the value is in a game where one team is blown off the field and the winners have third level reserves on the field at the end.  Teams in ball sports will try to find competitive games with teams of similar levels to create a balanced competition.  Cross country is different.  Cross country teams can constantly test themselves against the best and still walk off with objective measures of excellence and improvement.  Avani Kalari finished 117th out of 265 runners in a star studded varsity girls race, which is nice…and that group helped Avani to a 47 second PR, 16 seconds faster per mile than last year, which is fantastic by any measure!  (A rule of running:  You should never complain when you just PRed.)  William Wu dropped almost five minutes from last year, which is simply wild–it’s hard to believe that number.  Amazing, William!  Katie Lee finished 36th out of 134 in the three mile JV race, which is a good result in her second cross country race ever, and she also ran 23 seconds per mile faster than she did two weeks before at Lagoon Valley–even though she ran the two miler at LV–so she raced a mile further while running faster!  Distance runners should seek out the best competition to run against, and not avoid races with the best athletes.  You wouldn’t decide to not take the SAT because you heard that some kid in New York who just cured cancer and qualified as an astronaut was also taking the SAT, right?  And that’s why runners will seek out some really tough races.**  

In the junior varsity girls’ three mile race, Katie Lee and Madison Polidoro lead the MVXC squad, coming in virtually side-by-side with 23:47 and 23:49 clockings.  As mentioned above, Katie’s time showed a big improvement in pacing; Madi’s first high school cross country race was a success as she was more than a minute per mile faster than her Watermelon Run pacing.  Senior Jasmine Varma dropped a full minute per mile from her three mile pacing at Lagoon Valley two weeks ago.  Sophomore Hemani Kamarshi improved her pacing by 46 seconds from last year at DLS while moving from the two mile to the three mile distance; I’m repeating myself, but getting faster will going further is an noteworthy accomplishment!

Freshman Ravi Polisetti paced the Junior Varsity boys with an 18:55 mark.   After merging the two JV three mile races, Ravi was 44th out of 345 finishers and there was only one freshman in front of him!  This was Ravi’s first three mile race and his pace was 2 seconds faster than his two mile race pace at Lagoon Valley.  Senior Sean Basu recorded a 30 second PR on the Newhall Park course, and junior Parmarth Joshi had a PR of over a minute!  Bradley Dulay had the biggest jump of any of the boys in the JV race in pacing compared to Lagoon Valley, with a 30 second improvement in pace while adding a mile in distance.

First across the line for the Varsity girls was Avani Kalari with a 21:38–a 47 second PR!   Anika Bhandarkar was next across the line for MVXC with a 22:27 and a 12 second PR that still left her a little salty–but she limited her saltiness, remembering that you cannot be too sad when you have a PR!  As our friend Angela Duckworth would say, top performers need to get used to always being a little dissatisfied; it’s OK to be happy with a performance and at the same time wanting to improve next time.  Two things can both be correct.  Megan Nieh and Manasi Prasad came in 12 seconds apart at 23:01 and 23:13; Manasi’s mark was a 38 second distance PR for her and a 30 second year to year bump in pace.   Valerie Ayzenberg wrapped up the top five for the varsity girls with her 23:44 run.

The varsity boys were lead by sophomore Tanay Parikh’s 17:49, good for 125th and a 31 second distance PR.   Only 31 of the runners in front of Tanay were freshmen or sophomores.  Senior Alex Nguyen’s 17:58 mark was next, a 12 second Newhall Park three mile PR for him, and then Ari Rajaram crossed the line with an 18:42.  Sophomore Ruhaan Shah impressed in his first varsity race, moving up to the three mile distance and running 12 seconds per mile faster than he did in the two mile at Lagoon Valley, putting a 19:09 on the scoreboard.  Rookie senior Gene Zhou continues to impress in his first cross country season, finishing in the MVXC top five once again with a distance PR of 19:16.

There is a reason that more than 25,000 runners compete at the Boston Marathon every year, even though there are only a handful that have a realistic shot at the podium–because those 25,000 (including your coach, 13 times) want to get out there and race with the best runners anywhere.  Big races can inspire you to find something inside you that you might not have known were there.  Keep getting out there and set even bigger goals for upcoming races and for future years!

Compete results are posted at XCStats.  Agnes Wang posted photos, too!  

Next up is the SCVAL Season Opener at Baylands Park on Tuesday, September 19.

Here are some improvements made by athletes at De La Salle–this is probably not complete and I could have missed some other good comparisons!

Alumni Update

Triya Roy and her Johns Hopkins cross country team had a stellar run at Michigan State’s Spartan Invitational.   Vivian Lau’s Tufts cross country team knocked off NESCAC rival Bates College on Bate’s home course in Maine.  And MVTF’s Nanda Nayak, a CCS champion for Monta Vista, has started medical school at Vanderbilt in Nashville. 

*Your SAT word of the day.

**I know that many of you are thinking that this was a tortured metaphor!  Stick with me here.  In running, and in life, I encourage you to not always try to measure and value  yourself relative to other people.  Sometimes the people you are competing with are the ones that are going to help you find things within yourself you did not know you had inside you.  Maybe you came back from DLS thinking ‘I want to win a medal there when I am a senior’.  If you turn that into a committed goal, and work towards that for with effort in cross and track and the off seasons, you are going have a great journey. Whether you win at DLS your senior year or simply improve a ton, you will feel proud of your efforts…and you will probably bring many of your teammates along with you.  And in life, if there was some high school kid from New York who cured cancer, and you thought ‘if they can do that, maybe I can too”, and that inspires you to become a medical researcher…whether you win a Nobel or just help advance medical science and help people, that’s a great journey too.  You don’t have to win the race in running or life to have a great result.  Just like the SAT.  Ha!  See what happened?  It was a long and random and wandering path, yet I brought that metaphor home!  And right now, across the country, alumni who have read this far in my post are thinking “reading this paragraph is just like every single day for four years at the start of cross country practice listening to Coach Flatow”, for better or for worse.