“I think everything I’m doing at the moment is calorie-burning exercise,” laughs Annalise Murphy, tickled as ever by the absurdity of what she’s gotten herself into this time. We’ve found a corner of the bar in the National Yacht Club in Dún Laoghaire and right now, her calorie-burning exercise is conducting an interview while her nine-month-old daughter Juliette uses her as a climbing frame. And a feeding station. And a general, all-purpose playpen.
“It’s like, when I’m sitting down, she’s drinking milk,” Murphy says. “When I’m lying down in bed, she’s drinking milk. When I’m sailing, I’m burning calories. Also, I’m cycling to and from Dún Laoghaire because traffic’s so bad at the moment. So basically, there’s always some kind of food in my hand.”
We thought she was done with all this. She thought she was done with all this. Her days as a competitive sailor were long gone, a chapter of her life belonging firmly in her Wikipedia entry. And yet somehow here she is, 36 years old and competing in a World Championship event in her own back yard.
That last bit is crucial. If it was happening anywhere else, she wouldn’t be involved. She’d be enjoying the last few months of maternity leave, grabbing coffee with a few of her friends who also happen to be in the early days of introducing a new baby to the world. But she can’t not take part when it’s in Dún Laoghaire, particularly when she played a small part in it coming here in the first place.
This particular World Championship was originally supposed to be in Spain, but when Valencia suffered extensive flooding at the back end of 2024, local authorities were understandably more concerned with the clean-up than with hosting a sailing week. When Murphy heard on the grapevine that the Spaniards might be pulling out, she alerted her father Con that there might be an opportunity there for Dún Laoghaire to get a bid in.
Two years on and here we are. The ILCA 6 Women’s World Championship has been taking place all week, a fortnight on from a successful running of the men’s event. The week has seen 108 women from 44 countries racing on Dublin Bay, including three of the top five finishers at Paris 2024. In among them, the Olympic silver medallist from Rio 2016, finding her way and holding her own.
“I’m in so much pain! You’re hanging out of the side of a boat, hanging off your feet and off your quads and hip flexors. I’m fit and I’ve got on to the water probably 20 times in the last two months to get ready for this. But the longest I was out for was maybe two hours. And that includes sailing out and sailing back in.
“So probably the longest session I did of upwind sailing was 20 minutes long in total. Whereas on the first day here on Monday we did 90 minutes across the three races, probably even a bit more.
“I was really enjoying the first two days but also I was physically in quite a lot of pain. I was kind of like, ‘This is fun!’ but also, ‘Oh God, I’m hurting so much.’ I’ve got a big cold sore on my lip. That’s how much my body is just like, ‘No! Stop! What are you doing?’”
Resultswise, she hasn’t fared badly at all. She finished fifth in one of the races, with four more top-15s in the mix too. Wednesday was a bad one – she was over the line at the start and had to turn and go back, leaving her chasing the rest of the fleet on a dead calm day and finishing with only one boat behind her. In her pomp, she’d have been raging at herself for a dumb mistake at the worst possible time. On Wednesday, she had more pressing concerns.
‘If Mary McAleese is disgusted by lack of progress … take heed’: GAA clubs on grassroots integration
“We were out in the water and there was no wind so we were waiting to see if we were going to do a second race. But it was taking a while and I was like, ‘We might need to get Juliette brought out here because I might need to feed her at some point …’ We were getting near to six hours [without a feed]. I was like, ‘I don’t want to get mastitis! That would really ruin my week.’”
She’s still the same Annalise. Still intense and driven on the water, still bould and gabby and great company off it. She’s only half-joking when she blames the good summer for getting involved here. If Ireland had been reliably wet and gloomy, she mightn’t have bothered getting back into the boat at all.
Taking part had been in the back of her head when it was first announced that Dún Laoghaire would be hosting. But in the meantime she had a brutally difficult pregnancy, laid low by hyperemesis, meaning she was wracked with nausea and vomiting right up to Juliette’s arrival. Though she felt much better after giving birth, that was still only the week before Christmas. From there to here in nine months is madness.
But then, there’s always been a glorious sort of madness about Murphy. She brought Juliette to her first gym session when she was just five days old, asleep beside her in her car seat. She won a bike race 12 weeks after giving birth. She was feeling fit and strong – or as fit and strong as could be expected – but even so, she wasn’t sure whether she’d be up to doing it. She didn’t even have her boat.
“My boat was actually in [husband] Cian’s sister’s front garden. It’s been sitting there, kind of in her flower bed. She lives out in Swords. So I think she was probably glad for us to finally come and get it. I was like, ‘Emma, do you mind if I leave my boat here for a few weeks?’ That was three years ago.
“And then I didn’t have any sails. I’d given them all away. The only sail I had left was one I’d given to Brian Keane to use in his garden because it was so bad nobody wanted it as a sail. So he was using it in his garden as a sunshade for a party and it was all stretched.
“I got it back from him and the first day I had it out on the water, one of the lads was going, ‘That’s a funny-looking sail …’ And I was like, ‘Yeah, it’s been a garden umbrella for the past few years.’ And then I was enjoying it and getting back into it so after a few weeks I said, ‘I’d better buy a new sail here.’”
So she raced in the nationals in July – and despite it being her first competition in five years, she won. If she was on the fence at all about trying to compete this week, that toppled her off it. The summer lay ahead and with a bit of family help to get Juliette minded here and there, she was able to commit.
“To do this, I’ve had to become so efficient, organising everything. Pumping. Having milk in cooler flasks, all this kind of stuff. All her food, all my food. Having all my sailing gear ready to go. Cycling to Dún Laoghaire, getting out sailing, lashing back in, having a two-minute shower, getting changed, sprinting back home to see her. You just become so efficient at every single thing.
“But I can’t describe how transformative it’s been. She’s the one I think about now constantly. Even when I’m out there sailing, I’m like, ‘I wonder is she okay? Is she being good? Is she hungry?’ I can’t imagine life without her now.”
Squaring all that with high performance is a layered thing. Part of her rolls her eyes at even using those terms to describe what she’s doing. She lived high performance for long enough to have intimate knowledge of what it means and to respect the distance between that and this. But at the same time, she is who she is. Give her a racing wind and a decent start and all the old urges come flooding back.
“I am a competitive person. Cian says it’s very funny – I’ll come from training and he can tell straight away whether I’ve had a good day or a bad day. Even though I’ll probably say, ‘Ah yeah, it was grand.’ But my tone of voice is totally different depending on if it was a good day or a not so good day.
‘How to beat the bullies’: What will rugby look like heading into the World Cup next year?
“So it’s hard. The reality is that after Tokyo, I was just … No one wants to finish their career on a big downer. And probably the majority of sports people do. I’m so jealous of Katie Taylor getting to have her ending like that last weekend.
“That’s probably how every sports person dreams that their career finishes. When in reality, most of us have a bad ending. You get some horrible injury and you’re wheeled off the pitch. Or your level goes down and it doesn’t end well for you.
“In Tokyo, I wanted to go and finish my career on a high. But I finished it on a low and then just didn’t really get back into sailing at all. So this has been great because I’ve remembered what it’s like. I’ve had a few days where I’ve come in just with a smile on my face.”
All of which invites the obvious question. The Los Angeles Olympics are just 22 months away. Any thoughts of trying to make the Games for a fourth time?
“Not really,” she says. “Because I know what you have to do. I know what it takes. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an amazing life. Being an athlete is the best thing. It’s very hard, but it’s also the best thing – you get to travel, you get to see amazing places, you get to push yourself and challenge yourself all the time.
“And you find out lots of hard truths about yourself as well. There’s nothing else that will do that to you. But it takes everything. And I can’t imagine leaving her [Juliette] and being away 200 days a year for the next two years. I would just miss so much. Some people manage to do it by bringing their babies with them but we’d need to go in and rob a few banks to do that!”
The week was what it was. She finished 24th overall, with only the top 10 going through to today’s medal race. Part of her will chafe a little, but given she hasn’t been in an elite field like this since the 2021 Olympics, that’s no disgrace.
And anyway, Juliette learned to clap this week. A win in any mam’s language.