Paris Marathon for the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre

Unfortunately tragedy of Ashling Murphy’s fatal assault seems far too close to home for many of us. 

Only last year I was contacted by a woman on Twitter to let me know that a man (who is still out on bail on sexual harassment and offensive sexual conduct charges) was following me and hundreds of other women on strava, following our location and taking hundreds of thousands of images of women without their consent (The Irish Times said he had 250k images). 

I am not prepared to give up doing what I love so the sacrifice, as things stand in society currently, is accepting that these disgusting stories are the norm for women. We desperately need this to change.

I’ve decided to run the Paris Marathon in April 2022 for the Dublin Rape Crisis Centre, whose work helps not only to comfort those in the aftermath of sexual violence but also helps prevent these attacks from happening in the first place. This is what we need - efforts to now catch the attacker, who has brutally stolen the life of a beautiful and intelligent young woman too early, are too little too late.