Running Roughrider

Woodward Park has been the home of the California State cross country meet for years, and MVXC travelled down to Fresno to run this 5 km track at the Roughrider Invitational on Friday, October 17.

While Coach Flatow has taken several teams to compete at Woodward over the last 15 years, and Coach Triya has raced there four times herself, none of us had been to Roughrider, and no current MVXC athlete had run on Woodward before. Roughrider turned out to be a wonderful experience for everyone!

The frosh-soph races were on a 3500 m short course, so we said “hard pass”–no one wanted to ride three hours in a bus to run part of the state meet course. Instead, we loaded up in the JV races, which were big–181 finishers in the girls’ race and 330 for the boys! MVXC absolutely held their own, with the boys taking 11th out of 39 times and the girls’ team finished 8th. Aiden White paced the boys while putting up a 19:04, with Ritik Shenoy, Akshat Ambekar, and Oliver Perrault also coming in under 20 minutes. Sophia Li lead the girls with a medal-winning 23:10 clocking good for 23rd place. 

With injuries holding out several girls, MVXC did not field a complete team, but Alex Qiu, Mel Zhao, and Naomi Hsu all held their own, with all three girls finishing in the top 75 out of 259 finishers. The boys’ varsity squad was paced by Kento Murase’s 17:16 and a 53rd place finish, and the team took 15th thanks to Sam Heinonen–for the first time this year, one of MVXC’s teams was in a tie, and Sam’s 6th place finish gave us a tiebreaker over Tulare Union (coincidentally, Tulare Union were the girls race buddies a half hour earlier, as we shared a starting box. Nice kids! But Sam took them down).

Various notes…

• Results are at XCStats, and the live results are still up with splits at 1 mile and 2.1 miles.
• Thanks to everyone who went down to the race! In addition to 46 finishers, Miranda Hsu, Eva Huang, and Darin Young all came down and cheered and helped out. It was some great, great spirit! 
• It’s good for us all to be together, competing, representing our school. This experience does not continue after college, and for most of us, high school will be the last time we have a chance to be on a team like this.
• No one was able to PR since this was the first time on Woodward for everyone on our team, we did have 35 athletes run their fastest 5km ever! See the table below.
• This is the last time this year that we all pile on a bus to go compete together. But…what about next year? One of my pro runner friends was texting to me yesterday about an overnight trip for MVXC26 that he says would be iconic, and he would be up for putting together a hang with some pro runners in his area for the night after our race. What do you think? Hint…it would be on a bus.
• Should we do Roughrider again? Give coach some feedback. How rough was missing Friday classes? How did you like the meet (this is about your experience…there are closer options for races, too.

5 km Distance PRs at Roughrider