She is 14, all blonde hair, braces, and honey tan. Inside, she is pure steel.

She is from the sun-dappled beaches of Kauai, Hawaii, but she has the toughness and determination of a city kid with something to prove.

She’s Bethany Hamilton, the teenage surfer who lost an arm to a shark and was back on a surfboard in three weeks – and back near the top in national amateur surfing championships within months.

And she’s tired.

She’s in New York promoting her book, “Soul Surfer: A True Story of Faith, Family and Fighting to Get Back on the Board,” and it’s been nonstop TV interviews with CNN, the “Today Show,” MTV, and “Inside Edition,” and today she’s got a 7 a.m. national radio hookup.

“At least it’s from my hotel room, so I won’t have to go out,” she says with a yawn, digging into a seafood salad and veggie burger at Mickey Mantle’s, earphones looped around her neck, iPod in the pocket of a pink sweat suit, and a couple of chatty girlfriends in tow to keep it real.

Writing the book was fun; doing interviews is a drag, she says. She’s shy, hates talking about herself, and the same questions again and again are enough to get a girl down, but she’s a trouper and she knows she won’t be famous forever.

Most of the world knows Bethany’s story. A “semi-addicted” surfer from age 5, she was paddling around near home trying to catch a wave at 6:40 a.m. last Halloween when a 15-foot tiger shark knifed through the clear blue water, took a jagged chunk out of her Rip Curl surfboard, and ripped off her left arm at the shoulder.

The water around her started turning red as friends rushed her to shore and a hospital. She remembers lapsing in and out of consciousness, but in her six days in the hospital she always knew she’d surf again.

“Why wouldn’t I?” she asks, as if it was the most ridiculous question ever.

Yet, she softly admits, she thinks about being attacked nearly every time she goes in the water. But in she goes; she was back in the water and on her surfboard the day before Thanksgiving.

“To constantly dwell on what might happen would totally suck the joy out of the sport,” she writes in her book. “Besides, it’s like asking, ‘What if the roller coaster comes off the track?’… Life is full of what-ifs. You can’t let it hold you back. If you do, you’re not really living.”

The rehab was tough, she says: having to relearn balance on a balance board and hanging upside from a contraption that helps strengthen and align her spine. There were months of psychological therapy, but the depression that some expected to come never did.

“She had this tremendous ability to put it all behind her very quickly,” says her father, Tom, a surfer who grew up catching waves in Ocean City, N.J., before heading to Hawaii to do it full-time. “She gets very determined and competitive.”

That determination took her back into the water long before her scars fully healed, though she can’t paddle as fast with only one arm and it took her three tries to stand up on her board the first time.

There are other little annoyances: Someone has to tie the top of her bathing suit and she sometimes needs help cutting her food. An incurable athlete, she can still play soccer – any position but goalie.

There’s no quit in her, and it’s been mostly big waves the last year. She not only competed in the national amateur championships in June, she came in second. She also made the amateur Team USA.

“It’s all her,” her father says. “Nobody’s letting her get the good waves out of sympathy or anything. She’s doing it on her own; winning with one arm. … She just wants to be a normal 14-year-old.”

That’s not always so easy when people recognize you on the street all around the world, from the beaches of Australia to the back streets of Lisbon. She still gets sacks of mail and gifts from strangers, and, of course, there’s those pesky TV, radio, and newspaper people with their questions.

Yes, she still thinks about turning pro someday and is so into surfing she jokes about getting married in the ocean – on a surfboard.

But it’s getting late and there are books to sign and there’s still MTV and “Inside Edition” to do before it gets dark. A girlfriend suggests taking a run later in Central Park.

“Yeah,” Bethany Hamilton says, another yawn spreading across her face. “That sounds like fun.”