Score a breakfast invitation to the home of Montana cross country coach Courtney Babcock and her husband, Miles, and the pancake toppings sitting atop the table give the first hint at her background. Aunt Jemima for him, but only pure maple syrup for her, Canadian to the core.

Raised an hour east of Detroit in Chatham, Ontario, Babcock keeps a tight grip on her Canadian heritage, as do most of her fellow expatriates who retain a fierce national pride, despite coming up on a hard-to-believe milestone next year: She’ll have lived in the U.S. for as many years as she lived in Canada.

Babcock is not just a native of Canada, a bystander who built her sense of place on what others were doing on behalf of the Maple Leaf. She represented her home country for close to 10 years at international track events ranging from the Commonwealth Games to the World Championships to the 2004 Athens Olympics, where she competed in the 1,500 and 5,000 meters.

Now into a new phase of her life, one heavy on coaching plans and parenting books and less so on her own running, Babcock recently returned to her past, both as a Canadian and as an Olympian, when she was chosen to carry the Olympic torch last month as it passed through Cranbrook, British Columbia, on its way to Vancouver, which will host the 2010 Olympic Winter Games.

The torch started its 100-plus day journey across Canada on Oct. 30. By the time it reaches Vancouver to light the Olympic cauldron on Feb. 12 to start the Games, over 12,000 torch-carriers will have been involved in an orchestrated relay that will have lasted over 100 days.

Despite the number of people involved in the torch’s passage, the Canadian Olympic Association wanted to have just one Canadian Olympian per day.

“I got an e-mail last fall from the Canadian Olympic Association saying they wanted an Olympian for every day of the torch’s run through Canada,” Babcock said. “I applied and put down either to carry it in my hometown of Chatham or Cranbrook, which is closest to where I am now.

“It was an honor to get picked because the torch is in the country for 106 days, and they had close to 600 (Canadian Olympians) who applied for those spots.”

Ironic because she’s one of the country’s most decorated distance runners, Babcock only need to jog with the torch a quarter of a mile before passing the flame to the next runner on day 86 of the relay, which went from Cranbrook to Nelson, B.C., on a Saturday in late January.

Representing Cranbrook was especially meaningful considering the city is the hometown of Scott Neidermayer, who was on Canada’s gold-medal-winning hockey team in 2002 and Ben Rutledge, a member of the country’s men’s eight gold-medal rowing team at the recent Beijing Olympics.

The torch run has generated nationwide interest in Canada well out of proportion to what would be seen if the flame was passing through its southern neighbor. Part of the reason is that 90 percent of Canadians live within an hour of the U.S. border, giving the torch’s path an opportunity to cut through the heart of the nation’s population.

The other is the same reason the announcement of the players making up the national Olympic hockey team is done on live, nationwide television: passion for the games most loved by the Great White North.

“With Canada being a winter-sport country and with the Games in Vancouver, there is a lot of excitement,” Babcock said. “Canada isn’t so much into football or basketball, but what reigns are hockey and skating and the other winter sports.

“It’s a smaller population, so when things like this happen, people get pretty excited about it. There is a lot of pride in the Winter Games.”

Despite getting the winter sports genes of her late father, Larry, who played hockey at Michigan, Babcock was blessed with the small frame of a figure skater and the engine of a speed skater, making her a natural fit for the track.

She got her start in the U.S. with the Wolverines, following in the footsteps of her father.

Babcock was a national champion in the distance medley relay for Michigan at the 1994 NCAA indoor championships and an eight-time all-American.

She moved to Missoula to train and compete with the Mountain West Track Club in 1997 and continued competing for Canada at international events.

She still holds the Canadian national records in the 5,000 and 10,000 meters. She set the record for the former (14:54.98) at the 2003 IAAF World Championships in Paris and the latter (31:44.76) the same year at a meet in Palo Alto, Calif.

These days, Babcock would appear to be another Missoula mother, now pregnant with child No. 2.

She drives around town in a ubiquitous Subaru wagon (though probably the only one with a “Go Big Blue” license plate holder) and makes frequent visits to Great Harvest, but she’ll drop an “aboot” on you when you’re expecting an “about,” and she is trying to pass some of that Canadian heritage on to son, Ridley.

“I think wherever you’re from, whether you’re from the South in the U.S. or from another country, you’re proud of your home area,” Babcock said.

“With Ridley, I’m trying to read him Canadian stories, and I’m trying to get him to speak a little French.

“He’ll call me ‘mum’ instead of ‘mom,’ and he’s learned his ABCs with a ‘zed’ on the end, as in ‘x, y, zed.’

“Just little random things like that. The U.S. has become my home, but I want to stay attached to my roots.”

Babcock has also recently tried to instill the love of winter sports in Ridley. The results would frustrate any true Canadian.

“I took Ridley skating for the first time when he was two and a half! I felt like such a bad Canadian. He should have been on skates at least a year earlier,” Babcock said.

“The whole time he was saying ‘I don’t like this, I don’t like this.’ I felt like a total failure as a Canadian mother.

“I’m still holding out hope that he someday asks us to make a pond in the backyard that can freeze over in the winter.”