Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront
Marathon.
Te s s i e r a t t r i b u t e s he r r e c e nt
gains to her decision in 2016 to
hire a coach who has helped her
stay healthy and train smart.
“I was so ignorant getting into
the sport,” she says. “I’m learning,
I am, but I had a lot to learn.”
Between 2012 and 2016,
Tessier suffered four stress frac-
tures: one on her pelvis and three
in her femurs.
She says she’s been able to
stay injury-free since then by
not overtraining and by paying
attention to her sleep and diet.
Tessier, who usually gets her
runs in early before heading to
school to teach, now trains for
one marathon a year instead of
two, sleeps eight hours a night
instead of six and eats meat after
years of being a vegetarian.
She says she doesn’t go into a
race with a time goal in mind and
has been surprised every time
she crossed the finish line to see
how fast she ran.
Being named to the 2019
Canadian World Championships
team for the marathon this year
was “surreal,” and she’s having
to learn to deal with the pressure
that comes with it.
“I need to shelve that idea and
run the way I run and leave the
pressu re out of it even t hough it ’s
there,” Tessier says.
Speaking to Canadian Running
this summer, she said she can
only focus on one thing at a time
and isn’t thinking about the 2020
Olympics at this point.
Tessier knows it’s unusual
for athletes to be laying down
personal bests and making their
first national teams at age 40 –
but she’s proven both are possible
and she isn’t ruling out running
even faster.
“I’ve not considered age to be a
limiting factor,” she says.
“I’m not naive, I know that it
will be eventually, but I think
our limits are as much or as little
as we make them out to be.”Andrea Hill is a marathon runner,
and the city editor of the Saskatoon
StarPhoenix newspaper.runningmagazine.ca Canadian Running 47Jes
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