Written by Jaryd Clifford | Runner’s Tribe
From the mountains to the super-shoes and the cameras that capture it all, professional running portrays to us a glamour that often falls short of the truth. In a world where it’s easy to feel like we see everything, it’s good to be reminded that we don’t.
There were no cameras when Tess Kirsopp-Cole lined up in Canberra last year to race on a leg she could no longer feel after months of painful running, chasing an Olympic dream she refused to give up on.
There were no cameras when a few days later she lay in the emergency room of Richmond’s Epworth Hospital with a 15cm blood clot in that same leg.
And there were no cameras just three months later when she sat down with her ON Athletics Club coach, Craig Mottram, to tell him that she couldn’t do it anymore. She was quitting.
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From afar, Tess has always exuded tenacity. The never-say-die spirit comes out in every word. I’m interviewing her over the phone just weeks after she clocked consecutive 800m personal bests of 2:00.55 and 2:00.40 in Europe. She has a flight booked home in a few days. “I haven’t changed it yet,” she says. “But I’m staying. I can’t go home now.”
As she prepares in St. Moritz for another tilt at the two-minute barrier, Tess knows she has emerged from a dark period in her career. Now that she’s made it out the other side, her reflections on her past paint a powerful picture.
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Tess had always dreamt of becoming a professional runner. From running laps with the family horses as a child to winning national junior sprint titles, her eyes were always locked on one prize: “The dream’s always been to be an Olympian.”
Having a dream is one thing, it’s often far away, a distant light guiding us down one of life’s many paths. Sometimes there’s safety in that distance between us and the dream, enough time to be better, enough room for us to breathe. It’s when we get close to that dream when life can hit hardest. We feel all the vulnerabilities of knowing that soon we will know the answer to the question: will my dream actually come true? Some of the best have crumbled in the face of this question. I, myself, have too.
When Tess stepped out onto Box Hill’s Haganeur Reserve five months before the 2021 Tokyo Olympics for her first serious attempt at the 800m, the distance between her and her Olympic dream would have felt astronomical. A clocking of 2:11.62 would have done very little to shift that feeling, but a win at the Victorian Milers Club is nothing to dismiss either. “There might be something there,” she thought to herself.
That thought proved to be an understatement. Nineteen days later she clocked 2:06.72 for bronze in the Victorian Championship. Then after a last minute call up to the Queensland Track Classic one month later, she mustered all the courage that comes with inexperience to hang onto Australia’s best two-lap runners to stop the clock in 2:03.00. By the time she won bronze in the national final two weeks later, there was no doubt about it: Tess Kirsopp-Cole had arrived and suddenly an Olympic dream transformed from a guiding light into a glaring reality. She had a chance.
Having suffered from quite debilitating endometriosis that had sidelined her in the years before, being thrust into the upper echelons of Olympic discussion felt like a whirlwind. “We didn’t know what was going on,” she remembers. “Everything really changed in my world. Not long before I’d thought maybe the dream was over, then everything was happening and I took every opportunity I could get.”
One of the biggest opportunities that emerged from this meteoric rise was a professional running contract with the ON Athletics Club Oceania. Being paid to run felt like another piece of the dream jigsaw puzzle falling into place. But over time, all honeymoon phases come to an end and so would this one.
Although a miraculous berth at the Tokyo Olympics did not come to fruition, Tess only had to wait a year before earning a call up to the national team for the 2022 World Championships. By the time she pulled on the green and gold singlet, however, the toll of European racing and a life defined by mere milliseconds had worn her down.
“I was really thrown into the mix and didn’t have the experience or resilience to cope. I was very much alone and it was a really big few months for me emotionally and physically,” she says. “By the time I got to world champs that year, I was totally and completely burnt out.”
Tess placed seventh in her heat, a far cry from her new personal best of 2:01.40 set a month before. It was a lesson in the idea that not all opportunities align with what’s good for you and she knew even then that the environment she worked within did not suit her. But how do you walk away from being a professional runner when that’s the thing you’ve always wanted to be?
She persisted, kept her head down and trained the only way she knew how – flat out. An improvement of 0.06s to her 800m personal best in 2023 would prove to be the last peak before her body told her enough was enough.
The shin pain started almost 18 months before that day in the emergency room. A first diagnosis of shin splints made it feel manageable, an irritating issue to confront but one that she could train through nonetheless. Time and time again, however, Tess’ training ground to a halt – the pain wasn’t going away. She took time off and had multiple scans to find minor bone stress each time but nothing to match the scale of what she felt. As she prepared to commence her Olympic qualification campaign last year – this time as an established contender – she admonished herself for the doubts she still had for her body. Maybe she was a hypochondriac, she thought to herself. No one told her to stop, but she also didn’t want too, not now that dreams depended on it. And so she kept running until she could run not one step further.
Without romanticising the sheer willpower it must take to run on a leg so pummelled into submission that it’s become numb, for Tess to have even finished that fateful race in Canberra last year is almost incomprehensible. To clock 2:03.25 that day beggars belief. What if it all hadn’t gone so wrong?
The next day she woke up in agony, her leg had turned purple. “I was in so much pain,” she remembers. “I couldn’t even run my hand along my leg.”
Tess hadn’t seen her Mum for a few weeks. When they did meet up after the race, she was in shock at the state of Tess’ leg. Only then did the alarm bells start to ring and the seriousness of the situation hit home. It all happened quickly after that and lucky it did too. A 15cm blood clot had developed in Tess’ leg, the doctors estimating that it might’ve been there for up to three months – any longer and the consequences might have been far graver. The doctors also took a pressure test of the leg, of which the readings couldn’t be any higher. Having run through multiple bone stress injuries throughout that year, her leg had begun to suffer from exertional compartment syndrome. Without any rest her leg became so inflamed that the blood had clotted, risking her life.
That was the last straw for Tess. Chasing the dream had taken too much from her. She wanted out. “I had a lot of feelings that I wasn’t good enough. It had been a really tough two years of feeling alone in the sport. I didn’t feel like I had anyone backing me,” she reflects. “I made a phone call to my parents and told them I was done. I wanted to quit.”
It took Tess another three months to pluck up the courage to talk to her coach Craig Mottram about quitting. “I said to Craig I hate this sport. I’m a shadow of my former self. It felt like I was losing myself to the sport,” she says. “I told him I was quitting athletics, I was cutting my contract and I was going to walk away from it all.”
Tess pauses after telling me this part of her story. It takes me a second to absorb it and another to remember that this isn’t an ancient story. This is a year ago. But you don’t run for three months in excruciating pain without having a deep-rooted drive to see what might be possible. The same characteristics that led her to train despite her body screaming at her to stop might be the very same characteristics that refused to let her walk away.
“There was a feeling deep down that I still had more to give. What if I tried something completely new?,” she thought. “I couldn’t live with myself not knowing how good I could have been or what I could have achieved.”
Still barely back on her feet, Tess considered her options. Gav Burren – the coach of Abbey Caldwell – came to mind. “I didn’t really know him, but I’d heard about him. I’d seen how he interacted with Abbey and I just thought he seemed like a big teddy bear,” she laughs. “Maybe someone like him would be the right person to get me back on track.”
She reached out via Instagram. He told her to meet down by The Tan. They didn’t just speak about running that day, but life too. It’s the way Gav Burren operates. “I don’t have a special formula,” he admits. “Any number of coaches could get Tess to run fast. I knew she’d been through a lot though and that the main thing to work on was changing the way she thought about things.”
Gav remembers Tess’s first sessions with the group. “She would be flat out on the first rep. There would be nothing left in the tank after every session,” he says. “We started to shift the thinking. She had told me she wanted to make the Australian team. I said let’s try run consistently first, then a personal best, then we can think about running under two-minutes. I wanted her to set intrinsic goals.”
And so Tess begun the long road to rebuilding herself in a new image. One where she would under-train consistently rather than overtrain fleetingly. She threw herself back into her studies and took on a coaching role at Geelong Grammar. Her love for running came flooding back because she was running for herself again rather than just as a means to an end. Our dreams should never lose connection with the kid that came up with them, for if we do we risk snuffing out the light of our inner-child that still flickers within us. In it’s place comes expectation, frustration, and the burden of forever chasing and never satisfied. The innocence of contentment surrenders to always wanting more, to always reaching for the rung on the ladder above you even if the effort will see you come crashing down instead. Tess experienced that fall in dramatic fashion. Some people never find their feet again, their lights extinguished forever. But not Tess, her light flickered on, she found it and coaxed it back to life with a new team around her.
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With a winter in her legs, Tess notched up impressive results during the 2025 domestic season including a win at the Melbourne Invitational. She capped it off by winning another bronze at the Australian Championships behind two of Australia’s most prominent 800m runners in Abbey Caldwell and Claudia Hollingsworth. In Europe, with all the experience that comes from confronting adversity, Tess took another stride in her career by running back-to-back 2:00s. Those two nights meant everything. All the emotions of this two year fight to return to health and to find her love for the sport again were evident as she stood there on the track, her hands clasped over her mouth. “I was just like wow,” she says. “After everything I’d been through, it just all felt worth it in that moment. Gav told me to believe in myself and I did – I really did.”
There were tears as she ran over to her partner, former AFL player Nathan Krueger, who had tears in his eyes too. “He’s been through it all with me and he’s had a lot of similar challenges with his time in sport too. We really went through it together,” she says. “At times, each of us was the only thing that kept the other going. He was the one helping me turn up to training some days and on other days I was the one helping him turn up to training. There was a period there where we definitely felt like everyone had given up on us but we hadn’t given up on each other. To have him there was the most special thing.”
What will we see next from Tess as she continues her European racing tour with her eyes set firmly on the future?
“I feel like I’m floating when I run at the moment,” she says with a hint of almost excited disbelief in her voice. “I think I can do it, I think one-five-nine is there.”
Gav agrees, saying matter-of-factly that “we haven’t seen the best of Tess yet.”
“And if we can get another winter into her…” he trails off, his meaning is clear. Intrinsic goals, consistency, the love for running, and another winter in the legs – the perfect formula for endless possibilities.
The ashes are well and truly dusted off and Tess Kirsopp-Cole’s rise from them is only the beginning of this story.
