An international at three sports, an All-Ireland winner in another, a mother and a wife. Lindsay Peat has packed in quite a bit in her 36 years on planet earth.
The enduring sporting love of the Artane woman’s life will always remain basketball, but long before she captained her country to a historic 2010 win over the Netherlands, she was an Ireland underage soccer player.
Also in 2010 she helped Dublin to their first, and so far only, All-Ireland ladies football title at Croke Park having only taken up the sport in an attempt to get fit again after piling on the pounds.
A few years ago she decided to scratch the itch that rugby had been causing at the back of her head, joining Railway Union and earning a call-up to the Ireland 15-a-side training squad after barely a handful of matches.
Peat is part of the Ireland team that will play on home soil at the Women’s Rugby World Cup, starting with a clash against Australia at the UCD bowl on Wednesday.
The summer I moved out of home I ate and drank. I hated myself - Lindsay Peat
But her proudest achievement is her 18-month-old son Barra and her main commitment is to her wife Claire, who has supported her as she tries to live and train like a professional in an amateur sport.
"She’s amazing," beams Peat, who is on a break from full-time teaching and working part-time in an office in order to facilitate her gruelling training schedule.
"Financially Claire has taken most of the brunt, she’s doing all the hours and without her and her backing and blessing I wouldn’t be able to do this."
And because of this the qualified secondary school physical education teacher knows that she may not be able to stick around the Ireland set-up for many more seasons.
She explains: "We would love to extend our family and Claire has already invested enough in me and sport so I don’t think it would be fair unless we could come to some arrangement where I was contracted.
"We’re not talking about millions, just something to help cover the mortgage because I can’t expect Claire to keep flogging away."
But before that Peat is determined to do everything in her power to ensure that Ireland give a full account of themselves on at home, with the group games in Belfield and the knock-out stages at Kingspan Stadium in Belfast.
With women’s rugby in Ireland a relatively new and fast-growing sport in Ireland, many of it’s leading lights in this country started out in other sports, including basketball, Gaelic football and soccer.
Few of them though, have achieved quite as much in quite so many as Peat before she found the oval ball.
He mother Marian knew a woman who knew a man who was setting up a basketball team near her home and she pushed Lindsey to join as a way of keeping her from roaming the streets during her first summer holiday in secondary school.
After a few years she moved on to Mercy, now DCU Mercy - at the age of 30 she decided the time was right to go to college and it was at DCU she studied PE - and that’s where she enjoyed he best and worst hoops days.
Her temper often got the better of her and she was ejected from plenty of gyms - sent off in other words, something she says caused plenty of self-loathing - before she learned to properly channel her aggression and turn herself into a future Ireland captain.
Gaelic football came along for her in her early twenties.
"When I had come back at that stage I had been really overweight and I’d lost five stone. I had gone from being in goals with Parnells, gone from that typically overweight goalkeeper, to going outfield," she recalls.
"The summer I moved out of home I ate and drank. I hated myself, I lost the life, this is only now looking back because at the time I thought I was grand.
"That year I went back, Mark Ingle, who had been that calming influence and had been able to manipulate my temper in a good way had gone off to take a professional position with Manchester Giants, so we had a new coach at Mercy from Australia, a really nice guy, who just had no time for me.
"I remember sitting most of the season on the bench and then coming off the bench in a final against Killarney in the Mardyke and Mark was back at that stage, he’d gone in October and this was March because unfortunately Manchester Giants had folded, he said we ‘we’re going to run this play and Lyndsay is going to shoot the shot’.
"I came off double-screen, pivot, three-point shot, the ball went in, we won and it was really then that I thought ‘I really want this all the time’. I felt I could give more than I had been giving, so that’s when I went off and lost five stone, got fit and got huge positive responses from people."
Rugby, when she got around to it, didn’t come easy. Her impulse as to get ahead of the play and pass the ball forwards - both of which work in her other sports, but are against the laws of rugby.
Nice reminder as we leave d gym💪...always try & be better, continue 2 raise d bar, push urself outside ur comfort zone #WRWC #BRINGIT #🏉🇮🇪 pic.twitter.com/DXQmji0DxL
— lindsay peat (@lilypeat11) May 2, 2017
The heavy hits too were an eye-opener as she was initially identified as a ball-carrying back row before she was converted to a prop by Ireland’s management.
"When I was watching rugby, the props were always these big fatties and I was like ‘am I after putting on weight again, is that why they want me?’. So I asked was I really that fat and slow and they said no - that’s not why we’re picking you in that position," said Peat.
"I decided I couldn’t say no to Ireland because that’s disrespectful to those who can’t be so blasé. I had only taken it up as something new and to keep myself ticking over."
Peat returned to education in order to become a PE teacher because she was keen to give back something of what sport and physical activity has given her.
She hopes too that this rugby world cup can leave behind a legacy of more girls taking up sport - any sport - and sticking with it through their lives.
"Sport had brought me so much and I want kids to experience that at whatever level, be that competitive or at a social level making friends," she concluded.
All of Ireland’s Women’s Rugby World Cup games live on RTÉ Television
