It’s been a few days since our Crystal Preview race on October 15, but I wanted to look back and add some thoughts.
Monta Vista ran really well! There were strong individual performances: Miranda Hsu, Taylor Orr, Vishakha Shastri, and Tarun Gandhi all finished in the top 20 of their races. Our varsity teams took 6th and 9th place, solid team finishes in SCVAL.
MVXC athletes also racked up 12 new personal records on the Crystal Springs course. That’s an exceptional number for the first trip to Crystal this year, and the PRs are even more remarkable coming after a hard workout on Tuesday.
Keeping a normal training load going into a race, with no taper and no extra rest, is called “training through” a competition. Because weather disrupted our schedule over the prior weeks, we treated the Crystal meet as just another part of our training block, so it isn’t surprising if some athletes felt a bit fatigued on the line and during the race. Our goal was to use the race as a training stimulus and a learning experience rather than to hit our peak performance. Despite that, several of us, including many of our varsity boys, still had PRs. That is so impressive!
Crystal Springs PRs October 15
| Athlete | PR By |
| Taylor Orr | 4:00 |
| Leon Zhu | 2:16 |
| Fahad Ali | 1:00 |
| Ritik Shenoy | 0:51 |
| Akshat Ambekar | 0:39 |
| Aadit Shinde | 0:36 |
| Aiden White | 0:34 |
| Sam Heinonen | 0:28 |
| Oliver Perrault | 0:28 |
| Eli Wang | 0:18 |
| Tarun Gandhi | 0:15 |
| Luna Lee | 0:05 |
All that is great! And I could finish this write up here if I wanted.
However, what really impressed the coaches was attitude.
- Athletes embraced the Crystal Springs course! Crystal is tough, no doubt about it, but running on Fremont Older prepares MVXC athletes for the challenge. So many athletes had huge smiles or positive remarks about the course and their races. Embracing a challenge is the first step to meeting it.
- Athletes were supporting their teammates! Athletes were running all over to cheer for their teammates, and coming to the start to wish runners good luck and carry warmups back to our camp. That’s a big part of what makes our team special.
- Thank you for the thank yous! I appreciate that so many of you went out of their way to thank our timer, Mr. Lawson; he does so much for our league and our team.
A positive, team-oriented attitude will take us-and YOU-far!
Again: nice job at Crystal, on the course and all around it!
Complete results are at XCStats. There are photos in our Band album, and Malcolm Slaney also posted more.
