CREDIT: COURTESY OF FANSHAWE ATHLETICS
Nicole Bernardi started running for Fanshawe in September and has a couple achievements under her belt - including OCAA's Rookie of the Year award.

Near the end of high school, Nicole Bernardi was looking for an activity to stay fit. Most team sports were over, and there weren’t enough girls to make teams for the sports that were still being played.

That’s when she started running with her mom.

“At the beginning, I did not really enjoy it, and it was painful,” she said. “Mom would run backwards encouraging me as I huffed and puffed.”

The Fanshawe College student eventually caught the running bug, and four years later, she placed 10th out of 107 runners on November 8 in Calgary at the Canadian Collegiate Athletic Association cross-country national championships. She was named CCAA Second Team All-Star.

The 22-year-old finished second at the Ontario Colleges Athletic Association cross-country provincial championships on October 25 in King City, ON, winning the OCAA Rookie of the Year award.

Nicole grew up on a tree farm in the country in between Port Stanley and St. Thomas. While she was active – she did gymnastics and played soccer, tennis and field hockey, among other sports – she didn’t run.

It wasn’t until the end of grade 12 that she started running – her mother was an avid runner.

“We could run for a couple of kilometres,” Linda Bernardi said. “Then she’d say, ‘Mom, just go ahead,’ because she was so tired. It’s funny, because she just persevered and persevered, and now I’m the one that she leaves behind.”

After high school, Nicole moved to Montreal to study urban planning at McGill University. She kept on running in first year but mostly just on the treadmill.

She tried for McGill’s varsity team in second year, but she didn’t make it. The coach suggested she join the McGill Olympic Club.

She ran seven half-marathons in Montreal while at McGill and raced twice a month, mostly on indoor tracks, which she says she doesn’t like as much as running outdoors.

“I really prefer longer distances,” she said.

Nicole spent her fourth year at the University of Melbourne in Australia, where she ran a 34-km trail run through a mountainous eucalypt forest – a type of flora native to Australasia.

The area and the town that hosted the run had burned down by bush fires some years before.

“The race was so eerie, because all of the trees have no bark on them,” she said. “It was just grey Halloween trees everywhere, and the whole mountain was like this.”

She moved back to the area following university. She wanted to take a year off, with the intention of going to graduate school later.

Between Mondays and Thursdays, she works at Organic Works Bakery. She works in the field at an organic farm called Common Ground on Fridays in St. Thomas, picking up vegetables and planting garlic.

Friday evenings and all day on the weekends, she studies at Construction Carpentry Techniques at Fanshawe.

“The year in between McGill and grad school was supposed to be a soul-searching year – to be really cheesy – and figure out who I am and all that jazz,” she said. “But right now I find that I’m so busy, I don’t really have time to do some deep thinking about that.”

She started running for Fanshawe in September.

“I was so flattered and it was really unexpected to get rookie of the year,” she said.

“I really didn’t expect it. But it was really, really a big honour, and it’s really nice to feel like someone is recognizing hard work that I’ve put in.”