On a crisp morning before the neighbourhood is awake, Lindsay Carson layers, and laces up her running shoes, stepping out the door into the pre-dawn inky darkness.

She starts running towards city limits, along a long gravel road next to Schwatka Lake.

The only sounds as she runs are her breathing and the steady crunch of snow with every stride.

After a long, meditative run, she returns along the stretch of gravel towards Riverdale. Nestled into a valley, the city lights twinkling, Whitehorse wakes up as Carson, 27, returns to town.

“The view of the city as it wakes up is quite beautiful,” says Carson.

She has transitioned with the seasons, running as the snow falls, but has had a long summer of training.

Following a difficult race at the Ottawa race weekend in May – Carson was recovering from a foot stress fracture – she opted to take the summer off of track racing and focus instead on a solid block of training.

Utilizing Whitehorse’s extensive trail system, she set out on training runs in the woods – Hidden Lakes trails – and on the pavement – Millennium Trail loops and Chadburn Lake Road’s familiar features.

The shift in focus from racing to training, allowed Carson to build a solid base upon which she’s been able to stay mostly injury-free for the past six months.

“This year has gone alright,” she says. “I didn’t really have a summer season, so when I started running in the fall, I was just trying to get into the swing of things.”

While not focusing on races, she did still compete in a number of local events over the summer months, which she used as benchmarks for how her training was progressing.

First up was the Yukon 5K Championships, which she handily won in 17:34 on the classic Millennium Trail Riverdale loop.

“This is just a good check-in for myself of where I’m at,” she said at the finish of the race. “It’s still not my fastest but it at least gives me a gauge of where I’m at in my training and where I need to be in the fall.”

Next, she was the top female finisher at the Yukon River Trail Half Marathon. She followed that up with a win at the Yukon 10K Championships in August and a sub-hour time at the Pre-Skagway 10 Miler at the end of the summer.

Carson started running in a competitive club environment in southwest Ontario and the move to Whitehorse was a bit of a shock to the training group mentality.

Her mother Leslie, and father John, were also runners out of the Tri-City Track Club in Kitchener, Ont., so when the Carsons moved to Whitehorse, so did a built-in training group for Lindsay.

“It’s a bit of a family effort,” said John of Carson’s training.

“We’re used to running in a big social club.”

So they began a small group of runners with about the same ability who do intervals together about three times a week.

Carson began competing in her early teens and said she likes the sport because the results are pretty straightforward.

“(Running) rewards hard work and it’s not subjective. It’s very kind of black and white,” says Carson. It also doesn’t discriminate.

“I grew up in a very strong club system. It’s the type of energy I feed off of in workouts.”

Work however, doesn’t always allow the group afternoon workouts, and especially at this time of year, when snow blankets Whitehorse and the seasonal Klondike Road Relay warriors hang up their runners in favour of other pursuits, morning solitary runs are the fuel for her training.

“Usually each workout has a goal or a purpose so if it’s getting me ready to do a certain race, or getting a certain pace,” says the runner, who never uses music on her outdoor runs. “I focus on the short-term goal of the workout and know in the back of my head the longterm goal.”

The longterm goal this year: a top 10 finish at the Canadian Cross-Country Championships in Kingston on Nov. 26.

All her races and training have pointed to the race. It’s the true north on her 2016 running compass.

After a summer full of building a training base, she started the fall racing circuit with a fourth place at the Vancouver Eastside 8K road race in September. It was a soggy affair, but one that arguably built some character.

Carson hasn’t always been known for pushing through tough conditions.

“We used to tease Lindsay that she’s a bit of a princess,” says her coach and father, John.

But since the training has been mostly injury-free, they’ve been able to add in what he calls “hardships,” such as hills or headwinds – there is likely to be both in Kingston.

Carson ushered in the cross-country season at the Yukon Championships at Mount Mac in September, an eight-kilometre race that she finished in under 30 minutes.

At the B.C. Cross-Country Championships in October, she finished just off the podium in fourth.

The race in Kingston will be a 10-kilometre event. It marks the first time that both the senior males and females will have distance parity in their events.

“It’s going to be tough those last couple kilometres,” says Carson.

“That’s an extra 15 minutes in the mud,” her father says.

Carson expects there to be a strong field chock full of Olympians and a strong collegiate crowd, as well as elites like herself. A strong placing would potentially book her a ticket to the World Championships on Team Canada.

“She’s definitely been fearless in the past,” says John of Carson’s propensity to go out hard at the start. “She’ll go out and run as hard as she can until the body won’t take it anymore.”

This is the first story in a series of profiles about the local runners representing Yukon at the National Cross-Country Championships.