Natalie Sepulveda ’25 lined up with her teammates while she waited for her 8:28 p.m. three-mile race to begin. She said that in these final moments before the race commences, she tunes almost everything out and can hear just a few people.
“I hear my coaches, my teammates, John Feland, and that’s it. I don’t even hear my mom if she’s at my races,” she said. For Sepulveda, these are the people who ground her at high-intensity cross country meets.
And at a big-league meet like the Woodbridge Invitational, Sepulveda’s dedicated focus contributed to the cross country team’s overall success.
On Sept. 15, 19 members of the varsity cross country team represented Nueva at the Woodbridge Invitational in Irvine Orange County Great Park, where they raced against 470 teams from across the country. The girls team placed fourth among 16 teams in their division and had six runners place within the top 100; five boys placed in the top 200 in their race.
For runner Lila Pastor ’26, it was the first race she had ever earned a top-100 medal in. “You’re sprinting through the finish line. And you can barely walk, you’re bent over, and you’re trying to stand up straight when they hand you the medal. It was so exciting and we were all so happy, even if we were so exhausted,” she said.
Overall, the race was “a really light hearted environment, which made it easy and fun to race in,” Jules Schlamp ’26 said.
Runners enjoyed the unique experience of racing at a twilight meet, with one of the latest races commencing at 9:16 p.m. for the varsity boys group. Apart from avoiding the hot September sun, Sepulveda described achieving “a level of focus that you don’t necessarily get when you are in the daytime with people bustling around.”
“There’s just this sense that it’s just you and your teammates in the trail. I always look very fondly on those [nighttime running experiences],” she continued.
Each season, the cross country team attends just a few meets with comparable in size to the Woodbridge Invitational. As a small school competing in a large meet, “it’s always a big honor to go to kind of like large competitive meets like this coming from a small school,” Sepulveda said.
Sepulveda credited the team’s presence at large meets to the runners before her: “I have an enormous amount of gratitude for past Nueva Cross Country runners who have performed well and made it so that we have this track record of showing up and competing well at these meets.” Teammate Teddy Gaillard ’25 echoed the sentiment, saying, “the senior boys last year especially, to me felt like role models and just great people.”
Besides racing, the student-athletes enjoyed a day at Disneyland in Anaheim before heading home.
While trying to find rides with the shortest lines, the team unintentionally continued their training. “You could tell we were a cross country team because we were running from line to line, saying, ‘let’s sprint halfway across Disneyland together,’” Pastor said.
More broadly, “traveling together, being together in an unfamiliar setting, and doing different things that are outside of the norm of school and running brings the team together and really is a lot of fun,” Gaillard said.
The invitational was just the start for the school’s cross country team, with upcoming meets on Sept. 30 and Oct. 5.
As the season continues, Pastor said that this trip will be an experience that will continue to motivate her. “The whole trip was so much fun that when I’m exhausted or sore, whatever it is, I can think back to this trip with these people that I love, and know that’s why I’m doing this,” she shared.
