Carolyne Prévost’s students showed her their cellphones as they entered the high school fitness room. She scanned personal workouts they’d created and typed into their devices — their homework.

Prévost asked questions. Made suggestions. Nodded approvingly after signing off on each plan; her kids nailed the assignment.

Then a phys-ed class like no other began. It couldn’t be anything else, really. Not when your 30-year-old instructor is the fittest teacher in the world and for a time last year ranked as the fittest woman in Canada if one accepts Prévost’s finish at the 2019 CrossFit Games a gauge of such excellence.

In her rookie debut, Prévost placed 12th at the Games, which bills its winners as “Fittest on Earth after proving their fitness in a series of diverse events over the course of several days.” She’s returning, too: She recently qualified for the 2020 Games in Madison, Wis., where tests like sled pushes, handstand walking and racing with weighted backpacks measure CrossFit’s ideal of fitness.

Back at Oakville’s Gaétan-Gervais, a French-language high school, Prévost’s students worked on box jumps. Low-slung rings. Resistance bands. Free weights. Chin-up bars for more stuff than chin-ups. Dumbbells. Music was playing, and chatting was minimal in the scaled-down CrossFit gym she’d designed.

“They’re very serious with their programs,” Prévost said of her students, sweating through their routines. “It’s awesome to see them so focused on becoming better.”

Against a wall, Océane Bruneau crushed 10 handstand pushups without stopping — elbows bending deeply, colour rising in her face, ponytail pointing to the ground. Back in September, the Grade 10 student could do half that.

“In Ms. Prévost’s class, we’ve learned a series (of) exercises with weights or body weight, a lot of them … I have never done (before),” said Bruneau, who wants to improve her core and arm strength.

“Her class has helped me become stronger and fitter as she’s helped me make my workouts more equal between muscles.”

As role models go, Prévost, at five-foot-three and 144 pounds, sets a gold standard.

When she’s not teaching math, science, kinesiology and phys-ed — or playing hockey with former Toronto Furies teammates in a new women’s professional association — Prévost competes on the CrossFit circuit.

At the 2019 Games, Prévost finished as top Canadian woman amid a field of professional athletes who can earn livings from prize money, endorsements, sponsorships and gym work. For instance, the three-time defending women’s CrossFit champion, Australian Tia-Clair Toomey, reportedly collected $414,000 (U.S.) last year in prize money alone.

To that end, Prévost is in a class of her own: no other woman who finished above her last year holds a full-time job that’s not linked to the sport, athletics or a gym, said Justin Bergh, general manager of the CrossFit Games. And no man or woman in the top 20 finishers was a schoolteacher.

“It is extraordinary at this point in the evolution of the CrossFit Games that a high school teacher would be competing against professional full-time athletes,” said Bergh.

“It becomes a pursuit that can be all-encompassing for many people and the standards that the top women athletes set, the amount of time that they put in, is beyond a full-time job,” Bergh continued, noting Prévost ended last CrossFit season as Canada’s fittest woman after her Games performance.

“So for someone to be (devoting) such a large chunk of their life, in particular in service to others as a teacher, (Prévost) is unusual.”

Prévost is modest, but with prodding concedes she carries a larger load than “the very, very top girls” in the sport.

“I think I’m the only one with a full-time job, CrossFit is full-time, and playing hockey at a professional level,” she said. Prévost earned $16,000 for placing 12th at the Games, an amount taxed by the state but still helpful to defray travel and training costs.

“I’m not sure how many girls would have that schedule on her plate.”

But CrossFit only landed on her plate after Canada’s Olympic hockey program broke her heart.

Growing up in a French-speaking community in Sarnia, Prévost was active in gymnastics as a preschooler, later becoming an elite all-around athlete. She excelled in gymnastics, soccer, hockey and taekwondo. (She was second at the junior PanAm Games in taekwondo.) Ultimately, she focused on hockey.

The speedy forward made the Canadian Under-18 team, then the Under-22s. She earned a scholarship to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where she and Badger teammates twice won the NCAA title.

She graduated in 2012 with a degree in kinesiology/exercise and movement science, and the 2014 Sochi Games loomed. She was among a small pool of top candidates vying for a roster spot on Canada’s Olympic team.

Then she was cut.

“I was kind of left at 22 years old with ‘You’re not part of the program anymore,’ said Prévost, sitting on a school bench, beside a stack of papers to mark.

“When you’ve gone your whole life competing (and) trying to make a national or an Olympic team and you don’t have that door open anymore, it can be really hard for a lot of people to enter the real world.”

In the wake of her disappointing release, Prévost made two quick decisions: attend teachers’ college at the University of Ottawa’s Glendon campus in Toronto and, during trips back to Sarnia, check out a local CrossFit gym that childhood friends used.

“I still had this urge to compete and I found CrossFit,” she said. “That’s what really saved me from just being lost after university.”

The inaugural CrossFit Games, founded by Greg Glassman, took place on a California ranch in 2007 with 70 athletes. Total prize money: $2,000.

The event became popular and rapidly expanded on all fronts, including a partnership with Reebok.

For the 2020 Games, with $3 million in total purses, about 240,000 men and women from around the world attempted to qualify through the elite Open Leaderboard method. (There are other ways to qualify, too). In that method, athletes perform pre-selected exercises before an authorized CrossFit judge; the videotaped workouts and official results are submitted to Games organizers, who rank participants.

Each affiliated CrossFit country, like Canada, produces a men’s and women’s national champion through the Open Leaderboard route. National champs automatically qualify. For the 2020 Games, Quebec City’s Carol-Ann Reason-Thibault is in as Canada’s women’s champion, just like last year.

(In 2019, Reason-Thibault was ranked ahead of Prévost going into the CrossFit Games, but Prévost placed higher at the event in Madison. Reason-Thibault was 16th.)

After national champions are determined, the next top 20 international male and female finishers on the Open Leaderboard also qualify to the Games. (Invitations were finalized in early January.) Prévost was second Canadian, behind Reason-Thibault again, and 26th overall on the global leaderboard for 2020.

Bergh, the Games GM, said Canada is the Games’ fifth-ranked country in terms of participants, after, in order: U.S.A., Britain, Australia and France. He said 12,606 Canadian men and women attempted to qualify through the Open Leaderboard for this summer’s Games.

“Canada is in a unique position because they have an abundance of talent,” said Bergh, noting Canadian men — like Patrick Vellner, a part-time chiropractor from Nanaimo, B.C. — are perennially strong, too. “Because (Canada has) so many good athletes, there’s another level of competition (at the Games) where they get to duke it out.”

Prévost has been preparing to duke it out at the CrossFit Games since embracing the sport seven years ago.

“I started loving the sport so much, and the competing; I’d finally found something that aligned with everything I’d done my whole life,” she said.

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“I didn’t have to specialize in a sport for CrossFit.”

You don’t need to compete either. Many CrossFitters just enjoy working out. For Prévost, however, the desire to test herself against others burned. So did the wish to belong to a larger group, especially after being let go by the Olympic hockey program.

“In terms of just motivation, it felt like I was back on a team,” said Prévost, who now works with Toronto CrossFit Colosseum owner and coach Paul McIntyre. “(At) the CrossFit gym, you had coaches, you had a community there working with you.”

How does she juggle this mammoth work-sport-life load?

Prévost hangs out with friends, but they are often where she is — at the gym and the rink, where they train and socialize. She also sleeps seven to eight hours nightly, in addition to an afternoon snooze.

“One thing that saves me is I take a nap every day after work,” Prévost said. “I need a switch between mental exhaustion with work and physical exhaustion with working out and sports in the evening.”

Her gym is near the MasterCard Centre in Etobicoke, where she has hockey practice. On hockey nights, she’ll train a few hours with McIntyre, then drive to the arena, where she suits up with her Professional Women’s Hockey Players Association teammates. On game days, she’ll be in the gym either before or after the game, depending on the time of puck drop.

Time management also means meal prep.

Sunday is her off-day. She catches up on school lessons and cooks meals at her west-end Toronto home, tallying about 2,500 calories daily, to take her through Thursday. Thursday is an active recovery day (usually cardio work for an hour, then 45 minutes of swimming drills) with more meal prep through the weekend. Though, sometimes, she strays with a Chipotle bowl trimmed with extra guac.

Currently, Prévost is eating more carbs for a mid-February CrossFit team competition in Norway. (She doesn’t usually do team events but said the Norway trip will help her “tune up” for an individual March event in Montreal, a key competition en route to peaking for her second CrossFit Games.)

For this year’s Games, Prévost’s goal is the same as last year: a top 20 finish. She actually finished 13th overall last year, but a woman in the top 10 failed a drug test, and she was bumped up to 12th.

The Games will be back in Madison — where Prévost attended university — familiar turf where she still has friends from her hockey days.

At school, Prévost has little down time.

She runs CrossFit club Monday, Wednesday and Friday during her lunch hour. On alternate days, she works with female students in the FitSpirit club to encourage fitness and friendship.

“I take five minutes to eat my lunch,” she said, which underlines the brilliance of her meal prep.

Bergh, the CrossFit Games GM, said he’s not surprised Prévost finds extra time to help students.

“It surprises me very little that she teaches math and science and fitness,” he said.

“CrossFit is a thinking pursuit, not just dumb work … so for her to have both an astute and organized mind and a powerful, skilful body is right in line with CrossFit as a methodology.”

Prévost is particularly invested in helping high school girls remain active or, if they’ve left sports, return to physical fitness pursuits for life. In FitSpirit sessions, girls train to walk, jog or run a 5 or 10k race this spring. In the gym, she teaches them how to use the equipment, what exercises are best for them so they can enter any gym with confidence.

“She’s a great athlete and a great role model for women and girls,” said McIntyre, Prévost’s coach. “That’s not a bad legacy; to have girls look up to you and say ‘I can be as fit as her.’ ”

Girls want to be active, said Prévost, who has four sisters, including her twin, Katrine.

“A lot of times, they don’t know how to get started or they feel embarrassed because they don’t want people to judge their technique or their bodies or themselves,” Prévost said of high school-aged girls.

“So when they see a female teacher teaching them how to do it … they think, ‘Maybe I can do it, too.’ ”

The boys are also listening.

In the same class where Océane Bruneau was doing handstand pushups, a young male student was getting ready to leap on a 24-inch box. It’s not easy. Think of standing still, with no running start, then jumping on top of your desk, both feet landing evenly — no wobbling.

The boy trained hard for the jump and in December, succeeded. He hadn’t attempted it since and in early January, it was time to do it again. Prévost encouraged him.

He had just finished his personal workout. He was sweating. He stood uncertainly in front of the large wooden box. Took a practice jump on a smaller one, about half the height.

Then, with the whole class watching, he leapt. Clean landing. The students erupted in cheers and applause.

Prévost beamed.