Earlier this year I attended the 2026 World Athletics Cross Country Championships in Tallahassee, Florida. The event dates back to 1973 (replacing the International Cross Country Championships, which began in 1903), and the last time the event was held in the United States was all the way back in 1992 in Boston. So, for me, based in Jacksonville, Florida, finding out one of the biggest distance running races in the world was going to be just 2.5 hours from me was hard to fathom.

We drove down early that morning to the course, held at Apalachee Regional Park. The event is comprised of the junior men’s and junior women’s races, which are 6 kilometers (about 4 miles); the senior men’s and women’s races, which are 10 kilometers (6.2 miles); and the mixed relay, a relatively new race of teams of two men and two women who run 1 mile each.

We arrived in time for the junior races, missing the mixed relay but finding out later Australia clinched the win. It was an unusually warm day, and I felt for many of the runners who come from countries with colder, less humid climates.

The course was spectator-friendly, with runners coursing through several loops to allow us to watch them more than once. A few obstacles themed around various regions of Florida were also placed throughout the course to add more challenges, such as raised beams runners had to hop, a lowered water pit and a sand section.

The weirdest part for me was revisiting the same course where I once ran competitively during my high school years. The same venue hosts the Florida Cross Country State Championships, and I raced it every year for cross country in high school, in which my team won three times.

It was wonderful to see so many people from different countries come together to support the runners. Kenya, France, Ireland, Great Britain, Ethiopia, South Africa, Uganda, China, India, Mexico, New Zealand, Sweden and many others competed.

While the race once held a little more prestige and was more popular in the 1970s and ’80s, I hope to see the event return to its former glory, as it was truly a spectacular thing to witness.

— Aoife O’Riordan, associate editor