a Sunday running chronicle · North Head
Events · Ballarat
the edition goes to Victoria — two races, one Saturday, and the best result of the weekend.
Victoria Park, Ballarat · Saturday 22 August 2026
205-4, the relay leg, and most of Victoria Park carried home on her legs.
The group has produced a runner it did not train, did not coach and cannot catch.
Izzy C. — Alex’s daughter — ran the 4 kilometre cross country at Victoria Park, Ballarat, representing New South Wales, and finished 25th overall. Not 25th in the club. Not 25th on the day out of the ones we know. Twenty-fifth at a national championship, in a field that came from every state and brought New Zealand with it.
And then she ran again. Two races, one Saturday, two different teams: 2507 in blue for the state in the individual, and 205-4 in club colours in the relay, where her team came home onto the podium.
The rest of this edition spent that weekend arguing about a 6k. The record should show the order of merit.
The Australian Cross Country Championships, Victoria Park, Ballarat — Saturday 22 August 2026, with races from under-11 to 70-plus. Cross country in Ballarat in August is not a gentle proposition: it is mud, hills and weather, run on grass in the middle of a Victorian winter, and it rewards a completely different kind of stubbornness from a coastal 6k in the sun.
Which the group discovered the following morning, at some length.
The meet, the fields and the full results are on the official page: Roster Athletics — the 2026 championships.
Cross country in Ballarat in August is not a running race with some grass in it. It is mud to the ankle, hills that arrive twice, and a Victorian winter doing its whole act — and it is run in spikes on ground that has already been chewed up by every age group that went before you. Look at the legs in the frame above and you have the course report.
Six words from a father in a group chat, which is the whole of it.
Twenty-fifth in the country, and none of us can hold her pace to the gate.