The falling snow sounded like the rush of a distant waterfall as it filtered through the leafless trees and stuck to the Jefferson County prairie grass.

It was interrupted at times by the sound of steel on steel as laborers pounded tent stakes into a frozen ground that fought back with each swing of the hammer.

Groups of young girls giggled and shivered in their sweat suits and running shoes as they looked out over a cross country course – increasingly growing whiter by the minute – that would determine a national champion.

That’s right, a national cross country championship in Kansas. In December.

That’s not the first activity that pops to mind for a Kansas winter, and Mother Nature on Thursday was doing her best to remind everyone why.

Regardless, more than 2,700 young athletes – along with another 5,000 family, friends and spectators – will descend upon Lawrence today and Saturday for the USA Track and Field National Junior Olympic Cross Country Championships.

Yet on Thursday, you didn’t hear many complaints about the weather or much else.

There’s a simple reason why: Rim Rock Farm, the 125-acre cross country course carved out of the Jefferson County landscape by former Kansas University track coach Bob Timmons. About 10 miles north of Lawrence, cross country enthusiasts from across the nation say it is a jewel in the running world.

“This is like the Mecca for runners,” said Gary Meinertz, who traveled from Rhode Island with 37 teenage girls for the event.

Sweat suit invasion

For Bob Sanner, sports market director for the Lawrence Convention and Visitors Bureau, Rim Rock Farm is the engine fueling a bonanza for the Lawrence economy this weekend.

The national championship event has filled all 1,086 hotel rooms in the city, with participants overflowing into Topeka and Johnson County, he said. Athletes will come from all 50 states, and from as far away as Japan.

In short, restaurants, gas stations, movie theaters and retailers should expect an invasion from teens wearing sweat suit and running gear.

“I expect close to $2 million in direct spending,” Sanner said. “I’m hoping the businesses experience a nice bump in sales starting on Thursday and going all the way through Saturday night. That is why we do what we do.”

Meinertz, as he looks at the group of girls and the small caravan of mini-vans that they all came in, was confident the financial windfall would materialize.

“Oh yeah,” he said almost with a sigh, “We’ll be spending money.”

Best of the best

Races will start at 10 a.m. on Saturday, and they will last throughout the day. But opening ceremonies will be this evening at the Lied Center, featuring a speech from Olympic gold medalist and Kansas University track legend Billy Mills. Many runners, though, started arriving on Thursday to begin touring the course.

The USA Track and Field event is for boys and girls between 10 to 18 years old, who have qualified for the championship through a series of regional events. Athletes will run 3, 4, or 5 kilometers, depending on their age.

“This will be the best of the best,” said Andy Martin, director of Grassroots Programs for USA Track and Field. “Some of these kids will move on to be our next crop of stars in track and field.”

Unique venue

A thin coat of ice already had begun to form on the pond where Copperhead Trail and Teardrop Downsweep – cross country talk for a steep hill – converge. Adjacent is one of the course’s two signature covered bridges, flanked by a ragged stone fence. The course’s trails – hilly, winding and brutal for those who run them too aggressively – are surrounded by alternating patches of Kansas timber or tall pasture grasses.

In short, this cross country course really is in the country. That’s part of the reason why USA Track and Field representatives decided to take their chances with the Kansas winter.

“Some people feel very strongly that this event should always be held in a warm-weather venue, but we feel that we should go to the best courses available,” Martin said. “That’s what you have here.”

Martin and Sanner both said Rim Rock is consistently considered one of the two or three best cross country courses in the nation. The fact that it is a full-time cross country course – not a converted golf course or city park – is its most unique attribute.

That’s what Timmons had in mind when he built the course in the early 1970s, then continued to tweak it for more than a decade. The course has been host to seven meets this year. In the past, it has been host to both the Big 12 Cross Country Championship and the NCAA Cross Country Championship.

Sanner and other area cross country leaders think more events certainly will be on the way.

“It can always be in the running for national championships,” said Steve Heffernan, the property manager for Rim Rock Farm and cross country coach for Free State High. “And that will just bring us more and more exposure.”