He’s only a sophomore, but Carlos Bustamante has already begun to make a run at the Palisades High record books. Running the school’s second fastest time by a 10th-grader since 1990, Bustamante lowered his personal-best by 21 seconds and led the Dolphins’ varsity boys cross country team to fourth place in its heat at the City Section preliminaries in Woodland Hills. “The conditions were perfect for running’a little chilly with a light breeze’and they field took advantage of that,” said Brumel, who recalled Fabian Castro running 15:49 as a sophomore for Pali in 1994. “Thursday’s weather was probably the best I can ever remember it being.” The result earned Palisades a spot in Saturday’s City finals meet, which will be the first race of the day at 8:15 a.m. “We went in ranked sixth or seventh and we got fourth, so I’m very pleased,” PaliHi Coach Ron Brumel said. “It’ll be hard to improve on that [in the finals] but you never know.” Bustamante completed the hilly three-mile course at Pierce College in 16:09 to lead a pack of Dolphins who all ran their fastest races of the season. Mohaned Elias finished in 16:40’a personal-best by 15 seconds’while Mike Fujimoto was 13 ticks better than his previous best in 17:07. Even the Dolphins’ sixth man’senior Marco Tringali’finished in under 18 minutes. L.A. Hamilton, which won the Western League Finals two weeks ago, ran seventh in its heat and failed to qualify for the finals. “We had everyone step up and we had better clustering,” Brumel said. “That’s what made the difference.” Palisades’ girls varsity was not among the top eight teams to qualify for City finals, but Lynn Lim dropped 35 seconds off her best time and fellow senior Etna Tiburcio broke 22 minutes for the first time. ‘I think the girls were ninth or 10th out of 13 teams,’ Brumel said. An impressive performance on the girls’ side was that of Carly Seder in the frosh/soph race. Her time of 23:33 was the Dolphins’ fourth-best overall and was the third straight race in which she lowered her time by almost a minute. Senior Robert Bird, who won the junior varsity race at League Finals in a personal-best 19:27, will try to improve on that performance in the City JV finals Saturday at 11 a.m. Brumel cited Monroe and Birmingham as the favorites in the boys’ varsity race on Saturday, with perennial power San Pedro and El Camino Real also a threat. As for the girls, he sees Reseda running away with the title. “They are really deep and really fast this year,” he said. “They have six girls who can run under 20 minutes.”
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