After 22 years of elite-level sport, the sportswoman reflects on a career of breakthroughs, being a girl in a man’s world and the joy of acceptance and progress

Erin Phillips has already kicked off her white sneakers by the time we start walking south along Tennyson Beach in Adelaide. She casually leaves them behind on the sand as we dodge seaweed and dead crabs marooned by the morning tide – this is her local, after all.

“I’d say I’m here at least five mornings a week, whether it’s running to Grange Jetty, or I go with the dogs,” she says, squinting into the golden sunlight.