The second Santa Clara Valley Athletic League (SCVAL) race at Baylands is the first time MVXC doubles back on the same course in a season, so this is a good measuring stick of personal and team growth. MVXC athletes aced this test! Here is a list of course and distance personal records set on Tuesday, October 21:
Baylands Personal Records Set October 21, 2025
| Name | PR | PR by |
| Ananya Parakimeethal | 27:36 | 6:01 |
| Lucas Chuang | 22:49 | 2:58 |
| Sarah Kumar | 28:36 | 2:24 |
| Zhengyin Zhu | 23:49 | 2:24 |
| Sophia Li | 22:40 | 2:20 |
| Krishna Batni | 22:55 | 2:17 |
| Jimin Park | 22:25 | 2:16 |
| Caroline Labudde | 27:45 | 2:11 |
| Aric Obaidur | 22:37 | 2:10 |
| Myra Mishra | 23:42 | 2:05 |
| Melinda Zhao | 21:38 | 1:57 |
| Medha Rustagi | 25:34 | 1:56 |
| Aiden White | 18:55 | 1:47 |
| Shouki Baba | 21:08 | 1:47 |
| Eli Wang | 23:29 | 1:39 |
| Fahad Ali | 21:04 | 1:35 |
| Ethan Ge | 20:09 | 1:22 |
| Ruoshi Li | 27:50 | 1:22 |
| Naomi Hsu | 21:18 | 1:19 |
| Jayden Mattekatt | 20:30 | 1:18 |
| Aadit Shinde | 21:18 | 1:08 |
| Zeynep Dogan | 24:35 | 0:54 |
| Kaitlyn Lum | 24:30 | 0:53 |
| Oliver Perrault | 19:50 | 0:53 |
| Youheng Zhong | 24:17 | 0:53 |
| Josiah Lim | 19:55 | 0:52 |
| Riu Yamada | 17:27 | 0:51 |
| Alexandra Qiu | 21:31 | 0:49 |
| Abhi Kotari | 22:52 | 0:48 |
| Darren Hsu | 22:22 | 0:48 |
| Ethan Yang | 17:52 | 0:46 |
| Samuel Heinonen | 18:14 | 0:44 |
| Jonah Chang | 20:10 | 0:38 |
| Ritik Shenoy | 19:11 | 0:33 |
| Tarun Gandhi | 17:28 | 0:30 |
| Luna Lee | 27:18 | 0:23 |
| Constantine Chua | 18:20 | 0:16 |
| Ashwanth Sundaramoorthi | 18:54 | 0:12 |
| Brandon Wang | 20:52 | 0:03 |
MVXC athletes set some hefty records! If you whack a minute or two–much less six minutes, my goodness Ananya–there is more than one thing happening. Fitness, for sure, is increasing–four weeks of training can make a difference, particularly for new or newish runners. There could also be some better habits or better planning at work as athletes learn what warm up strategies are most helpful for them, what food is most helpful the night before and the day of the race, focus on better sleep, or something else. And we are all just getting better at racing–maybe we are figuring out how to pace ourselves better, or realizing we can tell the little voice in our head that is screaming, “this is too painful we need to slow down now!” can take a beat, we are going to finish this race with nothing left in the tank, so be quiet little voice. And maybe we are just getting more aware of what is going on around us, so we look up and see a teammate and think, “I’ve been running with her all season so if she can pick it up then so can I.” There is a lot of things going on that lead to improvement, and we can embrace all of it*.
As a team, we have clearly been improving. I do want to acknowledge that not everyone had a PR, and that’s OK. A team hardly ever gets a 100% PR day (those are very, very rare, and kinda magical). Most of the time, improvement is not a nice even line on a chart that goes up and to the right. Usually, improvement is a sawtooth** with periods of bliss and joy as the chartline heads upward, and frustration and annoyance or worse as we hit a speedbump and the chart seems to go down. This is where Angela Duckworth’s teachings about grit become most relevant–can we stick with the program in the face of a setback, whether that is running or learning a language or writing a book or building a company. I believe we all can. So a little message–if you had a PR, enjoy it and celebrate it, and store that in your memory box to bring out again when you have a day where you don’t PR. And if you didn’t PR on Tuesday, don’t worry, you are all training together and your days will come too. Think about what happened, think about what you might want to do differently (different warmup? more sleep? less of grandma’s spicy chicken for lunch? push harder in the middle mile? more dedicated training?), then throw the result away.
Results are posted on XCStats. Our teams did just fine–our varsity girls took 9th and the JV girls 5th, while the varsity boys finished 8th with the frosh-soph and JV teams took 6th and 7th. So–we had every place from 5 to 9 in our 15 team league–that’s funny. We are ready for leagues in two weeks!
I’ll have a meet sheet out for Lynbrook shortly; the meet is on October 30 and will be our senior recognition meet.
Good work, everyone!
*This can be true of improvement in other areas too. For example, I know over the course of my career, I got better at being in a job interview. Some of the improvement came from being in more interviews and thinking about what I could do better the next time. I also gained more work experience so I more knowledge and stories to draw upon. Also, over time I just got less stressed about what was happening, so I became more calm and more aware of what the interviewer was getting at. Improvement in any skill is usually not due to just one thing.
**I still had the ability to tank an interview even after I had become good at it. Ask me about my interview with McKinsey & Co. Spoiler alert, I did not get a callback!