Cam Levins set to race Canadian 10K Championships in Ottawa

The Run Ottawa team announced on Wednesday that Cam Levins will be racing the 2023 Canadian 10K Championships on May 27. The Canadian 10K Championships are part of the Tamarack Ottawa Race Weekend, and Levins, the Canadian marathon and half-marathon record holder, will lead a stacked field at the event. 

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According to his World Athletics profile, Levins has only run a couple of road 10Ks, and his PB sits at 29:24. He has run plenty of 10,000m races on the track, though, and he owns a speedy PB of 27:07.51, making him the second-fastest at the distance in Canadian history behind only Moh Ahmed (who holds the national record of 26:34.14).

Levins will ride a massive wave of momentum into the Tamarack Ottawa Race Weekend as he is coming off two straight record-breaking performances to start his 2023 season. In February, he broke the Canadian half-marathon record with a 1:00:18 in Vancouver, and less than a month later he travelled to Japan, where he finished fifth at the Tokyo Marathon in a record time of 2:05:36. 

The Canadian Championships will mark Levins’s debut at the Ottawa 10K, and it will give him a great opportunity to throw down yet another fast result in his 2023 campaign. He told the Run Ottawa team that he plans to use the race to help his preparation for the world championships, which are slated for August in Hungary. 

“I think it’s important to do under-distance races like the 10K, even while training for the marathon, since you still need to be prepared to finish fast and it provides good development and stimulus during a build-up,” he said. Levins added that racing in Canada is special for him. 

“The opportunity to run in such a competitive field in Canada is really great,” he said. “Ottawa has always been an event at which I’ve wanted to race.” 

The rest of the Ottawa 10K field has yet to be announced.