Suzanne McFadden for LockerRoom
Tattooed on the inside of Tamsin Horne’s right arm are the words ‘She is resilience’.
The phrase is simple, but speaks volumes about the 33-year-old’s remarkable life story – from surviving a devastating brain bleed as a teenager and the physical and mental complications that still affect her, to lining up this weekend in one of sport’s toughest endurance events: the Ironman World Championships in Kona.
“It’s the mantra I say in my head,” Horne says. It got her through her first Ironman – a 3.8km swim, 180km cycle and 42.2km run in Cairns last year, completed just 11 weeks after shoulder surgery following a wasp sting on a training ride.
It was also the sixth major operation she’d endured in a year – a run of events that would have made most people turn away from tackling a demanding multisport challenge.
Eight weeks ago, she suffered a grand mal seizure that left her exhausted, sore and “feeling like there’s a knife in my brain”, costing her four crucial weeks of training in her final lead-up to Kona.
But this is Horne. The mother of two, who runs her own fitness studio in Kerikeri, isn’t prepared to sit things out or wait for life to right itself.
“I lost a decade of my life to depression, to feeling useless, to letting PTSD and seizures consume me. So much turmoil,” she says.
“So when things are hard in training or on the course, it’s like ‘Tams this isn’t hard. You’ve been destroyed before. You picked yourself up, pieced yourself back together, and you carried on’.”
Like in this year’s Ironman New Zealand – not long after Horne’s dad died unexpectedly. “I almost quit five times. I wanted to send my coach a message saying, ‘I’m not emotionally there’,” she says. “But I knew [Dad] wanted to me do it… and I felt like that whole race was his race.”
Finishing fourth in her age group at Taupō, and earning her ticket to Kona – “the pinnacle of triathlon” – made the achievement even more special.
Horne is now in Hawaii with her husband, Kieran, an ultramarathon runner, while their children, aged seven and four, are at home with Horne’s mum.
“We usually tag-team with the kids, so it’s special that we’re going running together this afternoon,” Horne says. “He’s as fit and fast as I am, so we can hold the same pace.”
For Horne, being able to run at all feels like a small miracle.
As a sports-mad kid growing up in Auckland’s Māngere Bridge, Horne excelled in hockey and water polo. The youngest of four kids, she was always active and “pretty tough”.
She was 15 and a student at St Kentigern College, when she noticed something strange with her vision. Her dad collected her from school, and she slept for four hours. Later, while in the shower, she screamed and collapsed.
“My mum, who was an emergency nurse, tried to get me to communicate. All I said was, ‘My brain’s exploding’,” says Horne.
She was almost right. Horne had an arteriovenous malformation (AVM) – an abnormal tangle of blood vessels in her brain, and an artery had ruptured.
She suffered a significant brain bleed. Surgeons at Auckland Hospital waited a fortnight for the swelling and bleeding to subside before they could operate. Drifting in and out of a coma, Horne was in pain, blind and hypersensitive to noise and smell.
“My parents were told there were 11 people in the hospital that weekend with brain bleeds, and only two of us survived,” she says. “I survived the surgery, but it came with other situations.”
A few days after surgery, Horne had her first tonic-clonic (or grand mal) seizure, and was later diagnosed with epilepsy.
“For a decade I could have as many as seven [seizures] a day, and every three days. That controlled my entire existence,” she says, in tears. “There wasn’t a place where I wouldn’t have a seizure – in supermarkets, shopping malls, with friends, at parties. School was awful.”
She couldn’t see for the first 10 days after surgery, and still has poor peripheral vision, meaning she can’t drive. “I had to learn to read books upside down and backwards, because that’s how my brain was able to see the full page,” she says. Horne has also lost hearing in her left ear, and now wears a hearing aid.
She later developed psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, triggered by her past trauma. “At that point my mental health was shocking, and PTSD was finally diagnosed,” she says. “A seizure would be triggered by the smell of hospital grade disinfectant. My body was responding to so much internal trauma that I didn’t even remember.”
Last year, she was diagnosed with her third form of epilepsy – petit mal seizures – after her husband noticed her speech was slurred and she was muddling words. She has them weekly.
Even yesterday in Kona, after completing the Ho’ala practice swim with 1500 other women in the Ironman field, Horne had a petit mal seizure. “Talking to my husband, I said two words wrong on three occasions and was really slurry,” she says. She’d forgotten to take her morning medication.
Despite all of her setbacks, Horne can see a silver lining. “I think it’s created a real survivor in me,” she says. “My mentality is to survive through the hard.”
After her brain surgery, the teenager was told she shouldn’t play team sport again. “If I got knocked or hit, it would be really dangerous. And with my lack of vision, I couldn’t see the ball move through space,” she says.
After having a grand mal seizure during a long-distance run at school, her neurologist advised her the only exercise she could do safely was running on a treadmill. “At that moment, I felt everything had been ripped away from me,” she says.
A couple of years later, she found her groove in the gym – which sparked her career as a personal trainer.
Then, while walking her dog up Māngere Mountain, Horne decided to run down the slope – and it felt good. “So I started to sneak running back into my life. I knew there was a little bit of me still in there,” she says.
It wasn’t until Horne and her husband moved to Kerikeri, where life was “less chaotic”, and she became a mum, that she decided to run further. “I needed to do it for me. I’d been living in a shell for so long,” she says.
She began with half marathons, then marathons. A strong swimmer as a kid, she started to think about triathlons – and learned to ride a racing bike. “My first small distance triathlon, I sucked immensely,” she laughs. “But I slowly got better.
“When I ticked off my first 70.3 [half Ironman], it was the coolest thing in the world. Every part of me was so proud of me. For so long, I’d been told ‘You can’t do this intensity, your core temperature can’t get too high’, so it became a bit of a middle finger to that. My body was stronger than everyone seemed to realise.”
Suddenly, Horne had a new identity. “No one knew me as the sick girl – I was now a triathlete,” she says. “For the first time in over a decade, I felt like I belonged somewhere.”
When Covid interrupted her plans for her first full Ironman in Port Macquarie in 2020, Horne added a daughter to their family. She switched focus to the Cairns event in 2023, but she was plagued by new health issues – and six surgeries in rapid succession.
It began with hip surgery, followed by a hysterectomy for an organ prolapse, then a bladder operation, a cyst removal, and surgery to stop chronic nosebleeds.
The sixth surgery came 11 weeks before Cairns when Horne was training on her bike and was stung on the neck by a wasp. She ended up flying over the front of her handlebars, shattering her collarbone and rupturing ligaments in her shoulder. She needed three plates and eight screws and a pin to hold her collarbone down.
Two weeks out from her first Ironman, Horne dived back into the pool and surprised everyone by swimming 2km. “I think that was the perfect first Ironman for me, because it just showed me shitty things happen, and my choice is always to find the silver lining and get on with it,” she says.
She finished sixth in her 30-34 age group. “I didn’t do a great time, but I crossed the finish line and thought, ‘What did I just do after a year like that?’”
Soon after Horne signed up to compete in this year’s Ironman New Zealand, her father, Brian Stephens, passed away. Living with terminal throat cancer, he fell ill with Covid, and a machine malfunction in an ambulance starved his brain of oxygen. “We felt he’d been taken from us,” Horne says.
A runner, he’d told his daughter he wanted to watch her complete an Ironman. “That race became a tribute to my dad,” Horne says. Her time of 10h 34m 01s in Taupō in March placed her fourth in the 30-34 category and 21st woman overall.
For years, Horne had watched enviously as friends qualified for the Ironman world champs in Kona, and felt she wasn’t at the same level. Now she’s realised that dream – and success would be seeing her kids learn from her passion and resilience.
“I’m not here competing to win,” she says. “But with my husband’s support, we’re showing our kids that you can do anything you set your mind to.
“Yes, things were bad 18 years ago, but I’m happily married, I have two beautiful children, a successful business and a really beautiful life.
“Every time something knocks me down, a little voice in my head says, ‘It’s not a brain haemorrhage, Tamsin’. Nothing’s worse than what that was. Although I hate that it happened to me, I wouldn’t be who I am right now without that journey.”
And as she lines up ready to dive into the clear waters of Kailua Bay on Sunday morning (NZ time), Horne will cast a quick glance at her right arm and the powerful message she keeps there.
This story was originally published at Newsroom.co.nz and is republished with permission.