For the third consecutive yr, the Metropolis of Ottawa hosted the Canadian Cross Nation Championships in collaboration with Athletics Canada, Run Ottawa and Ottawa Lions Observe and Area Membership. The occasion noticed course information in each the ladies’s and males’s open races, plus record-setting registration numbers throughout the board—with greater than 1,400 contributors throughout the eight races.

The 2023 Canadian Cross Nation Championships (ACXC) hosted the lads’s and girls’s championship 10K, U20 males’s 8K and girls’s 6K, plus a U18 boys 6K and women 4K. The Frost Nation neighborhood 6K was additionally again for an additional yr, after a profitable addition in 2022, and the inclusion of a brand new neighborhood youngsters’ 1K race.

Regardless of the below-zero temperatures, there was a rise within the males’s open and neighborhood 6K races, with greater than 450 mixed contributors. Gentle snow and frost made for powerful cross-country situations and muddy races by the point the lads’s open race started within the early afternoon. The one disciplines that had been down over years previous had been the ladies’s open and the U20 division. The U18 women’ race noticed numbers soar, with 246 finishers.

15-year-old phenom wins Canadian U18 XC Championship

Two distance runners from Vancouver took house the lads’s and girls’s open XC titles. Kieran Lumb received his first senior XC title in a course-record time of 29:18, whereas on the ladies’s facet, NCAA standout Ceili McCabe dominated a veteran discipline from begin to end, profitable in 33:28.

“This has been an impressive run of ACXC in Ottawa,” mentioned Chris Winter, head of home packages at Athletics Canada, in a press launch. “Ottawa’s Mooney’s Bay supplied a difficult, scenic, and fan-friendly course for our nationwide championship.” Winter went on to acknowledge the help from Run Ottawa and the Ottawa Lions for a record-setting yr, which noticed the occasion surpass pre-pandemic numbers at each ACXC 2018 in Kingston, Ont. (1,156) and ACXC 2019 in Abbotsford, B.C. (711).

The championships will transfer to a brand new location in 2024/2025, happening on the final weekend in November at Fanshawe Golf Course in London, Ont., the place Canada’s greatest cross-country runners will run the Forest Metropolis’s greatest trails.