All is not for naught with the Track North Athletic Club cross-country crew.

That statement rings especially true for Newmarket native Dylan Brown, currently pursuing a Masters in Human Kinetics at Laurentian University.

In spite of the cancellation of post-secondary varsity competitions completely in 2020-2021, as well as any regional and provincial scale championships for local high-schoolers, many of those associated with Track North continued their training this summer and fall.

In that sense, it only stood to reason then that the local club would emerge as champions of the Open Men's team competition, securing half of the top ten placements at the Athletics Ontario Central Region Cross-Country Championships earlier this month.

Paced by 2019-2020 U Sport rookie sensation Keon Wallingford (1st - 25:15), the Track North contingent blazed through the 8 km course in very impressive fashion. Dylan Brown (2nd - 25:17), Paul Sagriff (6th - 26:40), Caleb Beland (7th - 26:52), Alexandre Fishbein-Ouimette (10th - 27:05) and Nick Lambert (12th - 27:43) all finished in the top half of the field.

For Brown, in particular, a 27 year-old two-time all-Canadian from his undergraduate days with the Lakehead Thunderwolves, the result provided plenty of affirmation to a comeback process that has understandably tested the young man's patience.

"It took a lot of self-reflection to realize that I could not get back to where I was without taking some time off," said Brown, who represented Canada while still a junior, qualifying for more or less the same squad that Wallingford cracked one year ago, and earning a trip to Trinidad and Tobago in the process.

"I've spent the past three years, slowly creeping back up, trying to do it the right way, slowly and consistently. I have to be smart and patient about it. What motivated me was knowing that I could run fast."

How fast?

In November of 2012, Brown was recognized as the top freshman at the Canadian university championships in Victoria, covering the ten kilometre course in a time of 31:22, fifth among all male runners that year.

Two years later, he would finish fourth at nationals, trimming Yves Sikubwabo of Guelph by a tenth of a second. In between was the roller-coaster that became something of a norm for Brown in Thunder Bay.

"With me, plateau isn't really a word in my vocabulary," he said. "I am either going uphill (showing progress), or downhill. I have a lot of ups and downs." Between the top five placings in his first and third year at Lakehead came a pair of injury riddled seasons.

"I had to step away from the team, at one point, because the downs and the injuries kind of got to me a bit," Brown acknowledged. "It's such a tough sport. The ups can be so good, but the downs can be so dark and twisty."

"I learned a lot through the downs. Even stepping away from the team, I learned a lot about patience and consistency. The toughest part was that I found myself questioning the love of the sport, at certain times."

Spending a few years in Sault Ste Marie before making his way to Sudbury, Dylan Brown may even have benefitted, just a touch, from a pandemic that helped keep expectations in check as he and his mates travelled to Toronto, following protocols to a "T" and living with a different type of race set-up.

"I don't think that I was 100% where I was in my first few years at Lakehead, just because we weren't expecting to compete at all this fall," he said. "I was pretty busy this fall, and we didn't know if AO's (Athletic Ontario Championships) were going to happen, so training was not the first thing on my list."

But with runners leaving in pairs at five second intervals on November 15th, Brown moved quickly from what he termed "a very strange race set-up" to the advantage that came with being partnered with Wallingford and starting one grouping ahead of Newmarket harrier Connor MacIntosh.

"We (Wallingford and Brown) started the race out together and one guy from the Huskies (MacIntosh) caught us at about two kilometres," explained Brown. "We knew that we had to make this guy work and try and break him, because we had to beat him by at least five seconds."

"At the 5 km mark, we made a move and it worked well - he fell off pretty hard. With two kilometres to go, I made a move and gapped him (Wallingford) a little bit, probably by about five seconds or so. I was trying to burn his kick before the end."

"But he's got those young legs and he caught me in the end. It didn't feel like a normal cross-country race, but we still looked at it like the hardest effort of the season."

And the most rewarding one.

Track North women also accounted for two-thirds of the Open Women's race, with Nicole Rich crossing the line first in 31:11, and Kelsey Lefebvre in third at 34:22.