Jemima Tennekoon, 27, represented New Zealand while at high school in Christchurch, then while living for nine years in Australia where she moved up from 200 and 400 metres to 800m.
However, she lost her love for training and got burnt out, so decided to move to Queenstown, where her parents live, last June.
Wanting to try something new, she started training with Queenstown Athletics Club coach Neville Britton and set her sights on running a half marathon — her first — at November’s Queenstown Marathon in under 1hour 30 minutes. She smashed that target, finishing fifth female in an astonishing 1:26.32, then setting the even more ambitious goal of getting close to 1:20 in this month’s Southern Lakes half from Cardrona to Wanaka.
Remarkably, she won the women’s race in 1:19.10, which puts her in the top-10 in NZ over that distance.
Tennekoon says "I’ve come to find out I’ve just been, I guess, a distance runner stuck in a sprinter’s body for the last 20 years".
"I came to [Britton] as a broken athlete, mentally and physically, and he’s helped me so much to build myself back up and guided me just to really enjoy running again."
She says she likes the variation in training, "not just speed, speed, speed, all the time".
Britton says her decade of speed and strength-based training’s helped her graduate into long distance, noting she appears to run effortlessly and very economically.
"But distance running supremacy isn’t just about technical perfection, 75% of it is about consistency and discipline.
"These are Jem’s strongest attributes — her work ethic is top-shelf."
Her next aim’s a 5km race on the Gold Coast this winter and NZ cross country champs in Christchurch — "I want to sort of focus on the shorter distances and just use my speed while I’m still relatively young".
As for national selection, Tennekoon — who’s grateful her sponsors LSKD and Brooks Running have stuck with her through her running transition — says she’s "not looking too far ahead".
Britton, however, she has the attributes to get even better and follow a similar path to NZ legends Anne Audain and Lorraine Moller.
