Somewhere out on the course at her first Dublin Marathon in 2023, Amy Thomson ran past a stranger holding a sign: "If you've given birth, you can do this."
She hasn't forgotten it. "It's so true. It's the closest thing I can compare it to."
She'd know. Eight weeks after her first son was born, Amy was on the start line of a sprint triathlon in the Phoenix Park.
"It was more for the fun of it. It was to prove to myself that you can actually do anything you put your mind to, even after having a baby. But my pelvic floor was not very happy."
A few months later she went back and did the Olympic distance.
On the last Sunday in October she runs her third marathon, for Team Hope.
Durban to Dublin, the Long Way Round
Amy is from Durban and has been in Ireland eight and a half years. She and her husband moved over three months after their wedding when he was offered a job here.
"I had never been to Ireland, and then my husband got offered a job. And we were like, well, it seems too easy to go, so let's just go."
They gave themselves three years. They now have two boys, aged one and four, and no intention of leaving.
She works for herself as a graphic designer and photographer, mostly family photography these days, after years in branding agencies.
There is also a longer connection, and it is a good one.
"My great grandparents are from Ireland on my dad's side. They fled during the famine and ended up separately in Durban, South Africa, which is where I'm from. And apparently a priest introduced the two of them."
Her great grandfather was from Rathmines. Her great grandmother was from Glenealy in County Wicklow, where her father still has a cousin, and where the family have been to find a headstone.
"It feels so cool for me being back in Ireland now after they left. It's quite special."
Eight Kilometres
Running came a long time after any of that. Amy did athletics at school for the fun of it, where 1,200 metres felt like a serious distance, and then did nothing with it for years.
She started parkrunning in 2016, partly to get herself through a breakup, and partly because she had just met the man who is now her husband and who was deep into his own running.
Then came the afternoon that changed the scale of what she thought she could do.
"I just started doing parkruns, and then one afternoon I thought, let me see if I can run further than five kilometres. And I ended up doing eight."
"I remember being like, wow. I didn't realise I was capable of that."
Her first half marathon followed later that year, and it was hard, and the bug had bitten anyway.
That is the moment she points people back to when they tell her they could never run. Not the marathon, and not the triathlon. The afternoon she went out to see what would happen if she kept going past the 5k she already knew she could do.
The trail running came courtesy of her husband, on an early date, in a manner she has clearly not forgotten.
"He was like, why don't we go for a trail run? And we started running up a slow hill, and then we got to this drop off where it literally was a steep drop, this tiny path that went down so steep. And he just was like a rabbit and hopped down there."
"I was like, are we running down there? That's crazy."
She loves it now.
Dublin, Prague, Dublin
Her first marathon was Dublin in 2023, when her eldest was still small. She bought her own entry, and then decided off her own bat to set up a fundraising page alongside it, which did better than she expected.
That instinct, she reckons, is something she picked up here.
"In Ireland that's actually a really big thing, and I love that there's a big culture of doing races and fundraising for good causes. In South Africa we would just do races."
"So it actually got me thinking about doing something I love, but also making a difference."
Prague came in 2024, which was hot and cobbled and hard going.
This year Team Hope came to her at the start of the season and offered her a charity place, with a minimum of €1,000 to raise. Her first thought was whether she would be fit to run a marathon at all, because getting back into it after her second son was considerably harder than after her first.
She took it.
"Getting back into running after the second was much harder than after the first," she says, and the training this year has been built around accepting that rather than fighting it.
Eight Years of Designing for Them
The Team Hope connection goes back nearly as far as Amy's time in Ireland.
Mutual friends introduced her to them about eight years ago, when she was doing freelance design on the side of a full time job. She sent on her portfolio, and she has been designing their promotional material ever since.
Which means she has had a closer look at the organisation than most people who fundraise for a charity ever get.
"Coming from South Africa and seeing the poverty there, it really hits home, and it's quite personal for me. So I see the difference that this kind of work makes."
The Four Ws
Most people in Ireland know Team Hope through the Christmas shoebox appeal, and Amy can recite the guidelines from the inside.
Four Ws.
Something to wash with, so toothpaste, a toothbrush, soap. Something to wear, like a hat or gloves or socks. Something to write with, so pencils and erasers and copybooks. And then something to make a child go wild, a teddy or a ball or sweets.
Mr Price stock the boxes, which children can colour in themselves, along with all the bits to fill them, and there is a drop off week in November at Mr Price stores and at Team Hope's headquarters.
Her four year old has just reached the age where it means something to him.
"I showed him the little promotional video, and he was like, we must make a shoebox."
The Part People Don't Know About
The shoebox is the part Amy thinks everybody already knows, and so it is not the part she wants in the article.
"They help communities to be self sustainable, and help them in terms of creating their own businesses and then being able to look after themselves."
"I love that it's not like they're just doing one-off projects. They're working with the local communities to help them thrive."
She names Eswatini among the countries, and she is honest that she has never visited the work herself.
What she has instead is her parents, who drive around Africa in a Land Cruiser and have been through Kenya and Malawi and Botswana, and one small detail from those trips that tells you everything about why a shoebox is not a trivial thing.
Her mother travels with pencils and paper in the car.
"Whenever they travel there, these kids are asking for pens and pencils."
"Something we take for granted can honestly be so important for them, and bring them so much joy. We think, oh, putting pens or pencils in a box, what difference does that make? But it really does."
The Rota
Two small children and two running parents means a schedule, and in Amy's house it is strictly observed.
Her husband runs Monday, Wednesday and Friday. He turns the Friday into a 20k trail run over the mountains, commuting from their house in Stepaside to his work in Cherrywood.
Amy runs Tuesday and Thursday, with her long run at the weekend. His long run is Sunday.
That is the main reason she is not in a club, along with the fact that a lot of her running happens at hours no club would be out at. What she has instead is a friendship group that functions as one anyway. She can text somebody and get company for 10k of a 30k, which is usually all you need.
This year she followed a structured training plan for the first time, and has watched her paces come down across the whole season. The tempo sessions were what hurt early on.
The long runs brought something else entirely, and she names it honestly.
"When you go for three hours on a Saturday morning, there's a little bit of guilt, and you feel like, oh, this feels so selfish to be away from your family for so long."
"Even though it's absolutely fine, and the kids are absolutely fine. There is an element in the back of your mind where you're like, why am I doing this?"
Nutrition, and a Hiking Mums Group
The thing Amy has actually fixed this year is her stomach.
Maurten never sat well with her, so she switched to Alter, the Irish brand, which she came to in a roundabout way. She knows the founder's wife Mel from a hiking mums group he set up, where a load of them would carry the babies on their backs around Dublin and Wicklow and go for coffee afterwards.
Her husband was sceptical and is now a convert. She uses Precision Fuel chews and gels alongside it.
"It's just so lovely that it's Irish."
The shoes have changed too. She ran her first Dublin in barefoot-style shoes, then wore them in Prague in 2024, where the heat and the cobbles made for a rough day out. She is in Adidas Adizero Evo SLs now.
A 5k in Blackrock Park
In September Amy organised her own fundraiser, a 5k in Blackrock Park with 20 to 30 friends, a lot of them South African, some of them pushing buggies.
She ordered in a box of energy balls from a Greystones producer for afterwards, and they went down better than anything else on the day.
It is a good model for anybody staring at a fundraising target and wondering how to get past the first few donations from family. A park, a 5k, a date, and whatever you can get your hands on for the finish line.
A Family That Races
Both boys have grown up around start lines and finish lines, which means they come equipped.
"They have their bells," Amy says.
At her husband's 50k in Northern Ireland the weekend before we spoke, the four year old and the one year old were both at the side of the course shaking them.
"It was very sweet."
Tap for Power
Amy's husband has run Dublin three times and has a sub three, which he got in 2024, the year Colin Farrell ran it.
She was standing at Milltown that day with a sign she had made that said TAP FOR POWER, and her four year old was holding it, with a clapper in his other hand.
Colin Farrell tapped it.
"I have a video of that."
For a week afterwards her son wanted to play a game in the house where he held the sign and his parents ran past him and tapped it.
The man himself has also done the full Wicklow Way, 120k at Lavaredo in the Dolomites, and goes to South Africa in November for the 100k at Ultra-Trail Cape Town. The weekend before we spoke he had run a 50k in Northern Ireland with over 4,000 metres of climbing in it, with both boys at the finish shaking their bells.
Two years ago he carried their then two year old up Carrauntoohil.
"My husband always tells them, you have to be patient. We have to try and teach them that hard things are worth putting in the effort for, and that this is how you build strength and endurance."
What Running Actually Means to Her
There is one thing running gives Amy that has nothing to do with times or distances, and it goes back to being a teenager in Durban.
She wanted to go out running on her own, and her mother would not let her.
"She just thought it was unsafe for a young girl to be running outside on her own, even with a dog."
"And I remember longing to be able to do this by myself and just go. That sense of freedom."
That is the thing she got when she moved here, and she does not take it for granted.
"Coming to Ireland now, I've really felt so grateful that I feel safe running on my own in the streets, in the mountains even. And that means so much to me."
"Running definitely represents freedom."
Her advice is for anyone who hasn't started yet, and especially for mums who feel they shouldn't be taking the time. "Just get out, go for ten minutes and see how far you get. And then if you're feeling good, keep going."
And for the guilt she talked about earlier, she has her own answer.
"It's filling your own cup, but then you can pour out to your family. Obviously you're using your energy, but it gives you so much energy. It's not a selfish thing. It's definitely not."
Sub Four
Amy is going for a sub-four-hour marathon in Dublin, and she has unfinished business with the number.
"I was on track for that with my first Dublin Marathon. But then the last 10k, my stomach was really nauseous, and I really slowed down because I was feeling so sick. Now I've changed nutrition and feel like that's all in order, so I feel like it's attainable now. I know I can. It's just a mental thing."
Her husband and the boys will be at Milltown, around 30k. He offered to hand her gels there. She's told him not to bother, because she's too nervous about missing him in the crowd, so she'll carry the lot herself.
Milltown has history for the family. In 2024, the year her husband ran his sub three, Amy stood there with a sign she'd made that said TAP FOR POWER. Her eldest held it. Colin Farrell, running that year, tapped it.
"I have a video of that."
For a week afterwards her son wanted to play a game at home where he held the sign and his parents ran past and tapped it.
"I love the marathon. It's one of the best days of the year in Dublin. Everyone's there, there's so much energy. It's one of the most well supported races."
