MVXC Completes A Second Week Of Practice

Creating fitness is like building a brick wall. Each brick might not seem like much by itself, but a few hundred–or a few thousand–and you have a wall. A few million and you have the Great Wall, something that would be hard to envision if you were the person with the very first brick in their hand when construction started. Race fitness is about stacking mile after mile, workout after workout, day after day diligently, one workout stacked on top of the last, until you see something in yourself that you never saw coming. MVXC has been stacking workouts for two weeks of 7am starts so far this season.

And it’s time to start a new school year! Darn it…too bad we can’t just be professional runners for the rest of our lives, get up at 7am for a run with our MVXC teammates, wrap up by mid-morning, shower, breakfast, maybe meet with some friends for boba and an afternoon of gaming or anime. That wouldn’t be so bad, would it?

Here is some of what MVXC did this week:

Round two of hills at Linda Vista, a longer set that last week.
“Dirty 4s”, including a debate on the difference between ‘a little bump’ (Coach) and ‘that is a gut busting HILL for crying out loud!’ (Sydney and several others).
A pre-tour of the Watermelon time trial course.
A visit from Jenny Xu, class of 2015. Jenny was a two-time CCS meet podium finisher, was on two State meet teams and went once as an individual, held the school 3200m record (her record was broken), and still holder of the DMR record. Jenny went on to MIT, where she ran on the cross country team, graduated early, and opened her own game development studio. Jenny still runs and is a Boston marathon qualifier. Jenny dropped by to look for beta testers for a new fitness game her team has developed, run with us a bit, and talk about her running in high school, college and post-collegiate.
Running Horse+Garrods, plus exploration of a few alternative routes including Julia’s Monster–backwards!–and the Prospect-Railroad exit that coach loves but few athletes will tackle but two did–by choice!

Here is a quick reminder of the MVXC practice schedule going forward:

Monday: 4:10pm to 6:10pm
Tuesday: 4:10pm to 6:10pm
Wednesday: 3:25pm to 5:25pm
Thursday: 4:10pm to 6:10pm
Friday: 3:25pm to 5:25pm
Saturday: 7:00am to 9:30am

If we can end practice early any day, we will release you early. If we start to run late, you can leave at the scheduled time without any problems…the major exception is this Thursday, August 25, Watermelon day…we always run longer that day.

Remember you must be cleared at this point! You have to be athletically cleared before practicing with the team. At this point, we are really looking for freshmen or transfer students (we understand that freshmen may have been bewildered by the paperwork and we cut them a little slack). Sophomores, juniors and seniors who have not been cleared until this week will not be earning PE credit this season and will only be added to the team on a case-by-case basis, depending on how prepared you are, how dedicated, etc.

Here are the current athletes on the MVXC roster; if you are not cleared and want to be on the team, please take care of this right away!

Valerie	Ayzenberg	11
Juliana	Banes	10
Anika	Bhandarkar	10
Vera	Bondar	10
Sandhya	Fasnacht	11
Siran	Gao	10
Avani	Kalari	12
Hemani	Kamarshi	10
Meena	Kolli	12
Karena	Lai	12
Katherine	Lee	10
Katie (Xiang)	Li	11
Megan	Nieh	11
Nerea	Northrop	12
Navya	Parvathaneni	9
Madison	Pollidoro	11
Manasi	Prasad	10
Nikhita	Saldi	12
Sydney	Stevens	12
Joshitha	Suresh	12
Jasmine	Varma	12
Zhiyi Agnes	Wang	12
Sophia	Yamada	9
Advaith	Anand	9
Sean	Basu	12
Soham	Beesetti	9
Denny	Dong	11
Sean	Foo	9
Roko	Gebbie	9
Ian	Gee	11
Pranav	Gupta	9
Parmarth	Joshi	11
Neer	Kuchlous	9
Ethan	Lam	12
Aaron	Lee	10
Jayden	Lim	10
Darren	Lin	10
Andrew	Liu	10
Kian	Nava	9
Alex	Nguyen	12
Nicholas	Pantino	11
Tanay	Parikh	10
Siddharth	Pellakuru	9
Ravi	Polisetti	9
Amogh	Rajagopal	12
Ari	Rajaram	12
Rishi	Salvi	9
Ruhaan	Shah	10
Raj	Thapliyal	9
William	Wu	11
Ethan	Yang	9
Jay	Zhang	9
Gene	Zhou	12