If Olympic places were handed out for air miles, Shauna Mullin would already have her passport stamped for London 2012.
Mullin and her partner Zara Dampney, from Dorset, spend their life in hotel rooms, travelling the globe in pursuit of ranking points on the world beach volleyball circuit. The indications are that it is paying off.
Being constantly on the move is nothing new to Mullin. She was born in South Africa, but moved to Penang, where she first experienced volleyball. It was not until she was 15 that the family, who were in the hotel trade, put down roots in Edinburgh. It was there that Mullin's volleyball career began to take shape, albeit indoors with Team Edinburgh in the third division of the Scottish League.
The team rose swiftly through the divisions to become Scottish champions with Mullin's contribution being rewarded with first junior, and then senior caps for Scotland.
When London was confirmed as Olympic hosts, there was an opportunity for Mullin to try for the Great Britain indoor team, but, by then, she was getting itchy feet.
"I had played in a couple of English grand prix beach events at Sandbanks and Weymouth with [Team Edinburgh clubmate] Jen Thom and it was great fun, but I didn't really see the side of beach volleyball that I know now," Mullin recalls. "It was more just messing about and having a good time as part of the off-season from indoors.
"Then I played with Mel Coutts [another former clubmate] and got an inkling into how a partnership works and saw the more serious side to it. We won the Edinburgh Urban Tour event and got to some semi-finals and finals of English events and I started to really enjoy the greater responsibility you had on court.
"My first international experience was at the World University Championships in Cyprus with an English girl, Kerri Olding, and I just kind of caught the bug."
Mullin and Dampney rose to 32 on the world rankings last year, with their closest rivals for the one automatic Olympic place as host nation English pair Denise Johns and Lucy Boulton, who are 54th. Depending on results, there is a chance GB could even have two pairs playing at Horse Guards Parade this summer.
Mullin was back in Britain briefly last week before leaving for another training camp in Fuerteventura. She then heads to Los Angeles to put the finishing touches to her season's preparation (which started in New Zealand over the winter) before flying off to Brazil for the first world tour event, followed by China for three weeks and France for the Continental Cup semi-finals.
Mullin and Dampney have already had a taste of the big time, both at the Olympic Test event last summer where they finished fifth, and at last year's World Championships in Rome where they were 17th, losing out to American double Olympic gold medallist Misty May-Treanor and Kerri Walsh.
"Last year, we got a couple of 13th places on the world tour which was really great, but the main thing for us was getting 17th at the World Championships in Rome," Mullin says. "That was really great to get out of our pool and then we unluckily got Misty and Kerri. It was a really great experience and something we definitely needed to have in the run up to the Olympics."
Mullin and Dampney have now been together for almost three years and the partnership has survived the inevitable strains of training, playing and living with someone 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
"The up side and the down side is the partnership with Zara. We've grown so much as a team. I didn't realise how much work had to go into the partnership because of having to deal with stressful situations. It's been amazing to go through this journey with someone else.
"At the same time, spending 11 months with one person in a hotel room can definitely create certain situations. There are times where you just don't want to see each other, don't even want to be on court with each other, but we work really hard with our coach [Morph Bowes] and a sports psychologist to make sure we have things in place to help us when that situation arises.
"It's funny because even though we both admit that once the season's over we can't wait to go our separate ways, it's not long before we're texting, emailing and calling. Because she's with me all the time, when we're apart I'm thinking, where is she?"
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