For the third consecutive 12 months, the Metropolis of Ottawa hosted the Canadian Cross Nation Championships in collaboration with Athletics Canada, Run Ottawa and Ottawa Lions Monitor and Subject Membership. The occasion noticed course data 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 group 6K was additionally again for an additional 12 months, after a profitable addition in 2022, and the inclusion of a brand new group children’ 1K race.
Regardless of the below-zero temperatures, there was a rise within the males’s open and group 6K races, with greater than 450 mixed contributors. Mild snow and frost made for robust 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.
Two distance runners from Vancouver took dwelling 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 subject from begin to end, profitable in 33:28.
“This has been an excellent 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 assist from Run Ottawa and the Ottawa Lions for a record-setting 12 months, 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.
