Hello from the Gold Coast of Australia! The GB Beach Volleyball women’s squad is based in Brisbane for an eight-week block of pre-season training before Christmas, with a short break in the middle to finish off the World Tour Season in Sanya, China and Phuket, Thailand. 

We began our journey at Terminal 3, Heathrow, where my partner, Zara Dampney and I did an interview with the BBC. We then flew 13 hours from London to Bangkok, where the plane refuelled, then on to Sydney where the airport was heaving with Bank Holiday traffic and we duly missed our onward connection to Brisbane. 

The result of this was an eight-hour delay in the Sydney domestic terminal - not exactly a hub of excitement. We finally arrived at our apartments on the Gold Coast, 37 hours after leaving London, to rain - lots of it. And we get accused of playing a glamorous sport!

Our apartments are in Broadbeach on the Gold Coast, which is a 20-minute walk from Surfers Paradise and the regular view from our window initially was - torrential rain. This wasn’t the Australia I’d imagined.

However, we’re not here to holiday. Our training week is split into three days in Brisbane at Sand Storm, (Australia’s Beach Volleyball Olympic Champion Nat Cook’s training facility), as well as using the Queensland Academy of Sport’s (QAS) gym. The other two days are spent on our local beach outside the Surf Club. 

A typical week consists of nine sand sessions, three weights sessions, three cardio sessions and four body control sessions.  Body control is a series of exercises to help us transfer correct body movement patterns onto the sand, i.e. jumping over poles, throwing medicine balls, and using bungee ropes. We have spent a lot of time falling over to make sure our centre of mass and body weight is in the right place.  

During our first week our bodies were in a lot of pain. The consistent appearance of single leg exercises in our gym programme only added to that pain!  We didn’t walk normally all week and stairs, both and up down, were avoided at all costs.  The saving grace during that first week was the pool recovery sessions, the massage stick and a tennis ball.  



In preparation for our final two events this year on the FIVB Beach Volleyball World Tour to China and Thailand we have been training extremely hard. These last two events will hopefully give us an opportunity to end the season on a high after not quite achieving all of the goals we had set ourselves. We also have our eyes set on the World Championships, which are being held in Rome in the early part of the 2011 season, and good results in these last two tournaments will really help us qualify.

You may ask why we are already in our preseason training before the competitive season is over? As a programme we felt we needed to grab all the time we could to be ready for Olympic Qualification, which starts with the first event in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in April next year.  

As a sport, volleyball and beach volleyball have been in the firing line recently, with funding cuts made in both disciplines. When these funding cuts were announced we were grateful we had the trust and support of the British Volleyball Federation to continue on our journey, both as individual teams and as a programme. 

It was a blow to have the men’s side of the Beach Programme cut, as we were quite a small group and having their support while on tour had a great impact. The cuts of the men’s beach and women’s indoor programmes just fuels our frustration that volleyball is still seen as a minority sport, and how that view affects the different programmes preparations for London 2012 Olympics.   

Shauna Mullin was born in South Africa and moved to Edinburgh, playing indoor volleyball for Team Edinburgh and Scotland. She took up beach volleyball three years ago and now trains with the GB squad in Bath. She got her first GB Beach cap in Korea in 2006.

British Volleyball is represented by davidwelchmanagement.com