Now this is perfect Sudbury sports synergy.

With a good, solid stable of runners at his disposal, Laurentian Voyageurs’ cross-country coach Darren Jermyn is anxious to jump into a season that will begin with far more of a feeling of normality than either of the past two seasons.

And for the first time in three years, organizer Jesse Winters and company will welcome both community athletes and post-secondary students together for the annual Sudbury Masters / Continental Insulation Ramsey Tour, the 44th edition of the event.

Suffice to say that come next Sunday morning (September 11th), from 8:30 a.m. through until around noon or so, things will be hopping up at the Laurentian Track – and that’s something that surely brings a smile to the face of volunteers and participants alike.

“We did this once as a virtual race at Lo-Ellen during Covid, but I’ve never run it as a community race which is something I am really excited for,” noted local sophomore Kristen Mrozewski, coming off a very encouraging rookie OUA season in what amounts to her secondary varsity sport of choice at L.U.

“I’ve never raced the local 5 km’s,” she added. “I’ve done the Turkey Gobbler (Walden Trails), but we do that for fun as a group of friends; we’re not racing it.”

In spite of a solid succession of noteworthy performances, starting with her inaugural cross-country season, running through to OUA indoor track and on to an abbreviated outdoor schedule, Mrozewski remains somewhat tepid with race day less than a week away.

“We haven’t gotten together yet as a team very much,” said the 19 year old long-time hockey netminder. “We’re a little bit nervous; it’s still early in the season. I think once we get there, we get to the start line and start racing, we’ll be okay.”

Still, it’s best to keep the goals modest in terms of individual times and such.

“The first race obviously isn’t going to be anybody’s best race,” said Mrozewski. “You want to see where you are at fitness-wise and decide what your goals are going to be this season. The aim for the first race is to show coach what you’ve been doing all summer, what you have been putting your time into and hopefully you get something that you are happy with.”

For a young woman who first started training with coach Dick Moss and the Track North crew while in grade 11 at St Benedict but never seriously challenged for an individual city cross country title during her time with the Bears, 21 year-old fourth year Health Promotions and Concurrent Education major Angela Mozzon has plenty of reason to smile as she prepares for her third year with the Voyageurs.

“I am so happy with how much I became dedicated to the sport,” said the local who finished third among the Laurentian runners at the OUA Championships last November in London. “In high-school, I found that I did it more for fun. But since Covid, I’ve really started to love running a lot more and just keep pushing myself to do my best.”

“Over the past two years, I’ve been really working on my mileage and that’s the biggest difference I see, is that I’ve just gotten so much more fit, just from the mileage alone.”

Having run the Ramsey Tour five km twice during her time at St Ben’s and again as a freshman at Laurentian, Mozzon enters the early September test far more conscious of exactly how she wants to tackle the course that includes roughly an equal mix of trail and road racing.

“I’m really excited to see how it goes this year because it has been so long,” she said. “I think my goal for this would be to start out quick. I think the last mile is really where I have to push myself – it’s almost all uphill. But it’s nice because with our workouts with Darren, a lot of times we will do 2km repeats on the trail, so we’re all pretty used to that gradual uphill.”

Similar to her teammate, Mozzon is anxious to reap the rewards of a summer of solid dedication to her sport. “At this point, I wouldn’t say that I am not fit, but I really don’t have the speed right now,” she said. “In a few weeks, once we’ve done some harder workouts, I will have a better idea of where I am at.”

“I really tried to do more mileage this summer and I’m hoping it pays off.”

With every other race his team will enter pretty much four hours away or more, Darren Jermyn could not say enough good things about the group that supports his program in so many ways, much closer to home.

“The Sudbury Masters (Running Club) are so dedicated to putting this on – and it is a lot of work,” said the man who knows that far better than most, still at the helm of the elementary races at the end of the month that bring together well over a thousand young athletes in most years. “I can’t think of another race – perhaps the Around the Bay (Hamilton) – that has this much continuity.”

And much like his runners, Jermyn appreciates the early season read that he gets to make on the team that he took over from Dick Moss a couple of years ago. “The expectation for our athletes over the summer is that they train and come into camp ready for the season,” he said. “They are not in superior shape; we want them at top fitness at the end of October and the OUA Championships.”

“But we really want to get a benchmark of where they are at.”