Elise loved sprinting while growing up in Adelaide. She would race her next-door neighbours and fully commit to the win (even when it meant ploughing straight into a rosebush on one occasion). In her early twenties, Elise rediscovered running. She became fully immersed when she moved to Copenhagen, Denmark in 2012. It was there on the pancake flat roads that she trained for her first marathon (Budapest, 2013), which she ran wearing a gold Casio stopwatch. The following year she ran Berlin and found out what it meant to “blow up”.

 

Between 2015 and 2017, Elise was working for the United Nations supporting humanitarian crises, which made running challenging. But no matter where she went, she always packed her trainers. In Afghanistan, she ran on the treadmill in the basement, or did 170m loops of the garden. In Sierra Leone during the Ebola outbreak, she ran solo on dusty, potholed roads. She also travelled to some obscure race destinations, like Pyongyang in North Korea where she came third in the half-marathon and stood on a podium in a stadium of 80,000 North Koreans (three hairstyles).

 

Since moving back to Australia in 2017, and finally finding some stability and consistency, Elise’s running has progressed. In the past three years, she’s shaved 10 minutes off her half-marathon PB and lowered her marathon time by 20 minutes. She loves getting out on the surfcoast trails with her dog during the summer, and running cross-country for Geelong Region over the winter. She is currently studying to become a sports psychologist, is a podcast host on For the Kudos and was a writer for running publication, The Blue Line.

 

Elise loves coaching because she believes in the transformational power of movement. She thinks the best performances come from a sense of curiosity and fun, which she brings to her coaching approach. Elise gains so much inspiration seeing her athletes grow in confidence and surprise themselves with what they can achieve.