Florence Caron to make marathon debut at TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon

By Paul Gains

Some athletes are never satisfied, even when they have tabled an enviable competitive record that includes multiple national championship titles. Florence Caron is such a person.

On Oct. 18, the 25-year-old from La Malbaie, Que., will make her marathon debut when she lines up for the TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon. The race, besides being a World Athletics Elite Label event, serves as the Athletics Canada National Marathon Championships.

Already this year, she has won the Canadian 10k road championship and successfully defended her Canadian 10,000-metre title on the track. Then at the Canadian Half Marathon Championship in Edmonton on Aug. 16, she claimed the silver medal.

Caron also represented Canada on the Commonwealth Games team in Glasgow, though she admits she was not prepared for a slow, tactical 10,000m race. Having already begun her marathon training, she had hoped for a fast, even pace. She finished 13th. The focus, however, remains the TCS Toronto Waterfront Marathon.

“On paper when you look at it, it looks like a really successful year,” she said during a video call from her training base in Flagstaff, Ariz. “You see medals at Canadian championships and I did small PRs (32:32 for the 10km and 1:11:49 in the half marathon). But it’s nothing quite successful, to me, compared to what I had done in the NCAA.”

After competing for Université Laval in Quebec, she transferred to Penn State University to be with her husband, Olivier Desmeules, an 800m runner from Quebec City.

As a member of the Nittany Lions team, she won the 2024 Big Ten Conference in both the 5,000m and 10,000m before finishing 14th in the NCAA championship 10,000m. A year later, she was 11th in the NCAA 10,000m with a personal best of 32:23.71.

Success at Penn State, where in 2025 she earned her Bachelor of Arts in linguistics, helped her earn a contract with HOKA Northern Arizona Elite, a small group of athletes sponsored by HOKA and coached by Jack Mullaney. That contract was signed in January of this year.

“The NCAA finals are pretty hard to do well in,” she says of her collegiate career. “I feel like 2026 has been a year of adjustment. Obviously starting later [in running], I have PR’d every year and I have had massive improvement and have adjusted to getting better every year. So I was not disappointed, but I wish it had gone better in my first year as a pro.”

Flagstaff has become one of the most preferred high-altitude training centres in the U.S. It sits at 2,134 metres (7,000 feet) above sea level, and like most runners there, she had a period of adjustment to living and training at altitude.

“The altitude was a switch,” Caron admits, laughing. “It feels like you can really push hard at sea level and you will be fine. Here, when you pass the red line in the workout, there’s no coming back. You have to stop.

“So I went out too hard at first and learned from my mistakes. You can’t take the easy run hard; you really have to go easy. It’s a learning experience everybody has. You definitely have to respect the altitude.”

Choosing Toronto Waterfront for her marathon debut was easy. Several runners in her training group are scheduled to run fall marathons — Chicago and New York — so their training programs are similar. There are other contributing factors.

“First, it’s in Canada,” she declares. “It’s my first one and it is not far from Quebec. My husband is going to come and pace me. My parents are coming. My step-parents are coming, so it’s really special.

“It’s also the Canadian Championship, so other good Canadians should be there, so I get to see where I rank amongst them.”

Caron is a latecomer to the sport. Through high school and Quebec’s CEGEP — a three-year program to bridge the transition from high school to university — she competed in cheerleading. Running was not in the cards.

“Yes, I did cheerleading for six years, and I stopped during COVID because, obviously, cheerleading is pretty hard when you have to do social interaction,” she recalls with a smile. “That’s when I started to run.

“I was living by myself in a studio [apartment], I was 19 at that time, and you cannot see friends or family, so I just started to walk, then run, just to get out of my apartment. Then I started track in March 2021.”

At the moment, Oli is in his first year working as a financial analyst in Quebec City. Although he ran 1:46.52 for 800 metres and won the 2023 Big Ten indoor championship for Penn State, he decided to focus on earning a living.

“As an 800m runner, it’s pretty hard to keep going without a professional contract,” Caron explains, before adding: “He just ran 51 km this morning! He wants to do an ultramarathon at some point, which is crazy since it’s so different from the 800m.”

Naturally, she misses Oli — he has visited her in Flagstaff twice this year, and they see each other between races. She also misses her five-year-old pet rabbit, a Netherland Dwarf named Gustave, or “Gus” for short. He lived with her in Quebec and at Penn State, but is now at home in Quebec City with her husband.

To fill time between training sessions, she reads, takes Pilates classes, and explores the hills around Flagstaff. She has also made plans to get her master’s degree in audiology. To that end, she is set to begin two courses remotely in September: one in statistics and another in communications. Both are prerequisites for the audiology program at Université Laval.

“I am starting a master’s degree in 2028 at Laval University. My current professional contract ends at the end of 2028 after the Olympic cycle,” she reveals. “You never know with running if you are going to get another contract, so that is my backup option, I guess.”

Caron’s final race before Toronto will be the half marathon at the World Athletics Road Running Championships in Copenhagen on Sept. 20. And then it’s on to the year’s major focus.