Zara Dampney and I were rivals once. She played for England and I played for Scotland on the national indoor teams, but now we play together as a team representing Great Britain in beach volleyball.

We’ve been together for three years now, although did have a short break when we played with different partners for half a season.  It did not take us long to realise we wanted to be teammates. That was the way we were going to most successful. 

Zara and I are very similar. We formed this bond with a shared objective of being the number one British pair and qualifying for the London 2012 Olympics in our own right. 

We are based in Bath, where we share a flat and, when we are on tour, we share a room. That means we are together 24/7 for 10 months of the year. It makes our partnership very much like a marriage. Over the past three years our friendship has strengthened, although we do recognise that this needs constant work, due to the strains of competition. 

Over the last couple of seasons we are learning a lot more about each other, and one of the main objectives this year is to use the things we are learning to make our team stronger. As in any relationship there are arguments, but our arguments mainly occur on court when we see different things from our different positions: mine at the net blocking and Zara’s at the backcourt defending. 

Normally we only travel away from home when we are on the World Tour playing competitions. However, this year our indoor training facility in Bristol was removed, which left us with nowhere to train in the UK. That meant we had to travel to other indoor training facilities around Europe. We were on the move constantly with all the inherent strains of travelling, not being able to cook for ourselves, and living out of a suitcase. 

We started our pre-season training in Hamburg, where the sand is notoriously deep, and spent the subsequent weeks in Tenerife, Prague, Berlin, Toulouse and Athens.  It sounds exciting to visit all these wonderful cities, but we were not there to sight-see, and often we arrived back in Bath on the Friday night, to wash our clothes on Saturday and be back to the airport on Sunday. 

Each time we arrived back in the UK, we thought our promised indoor beach facility in the vicinity around Bath would have become a reality.  But no. We still have no idea if or when one will be built. The additional travel and temporary living conditions of the pre-season has not laid the best foundations for this year’s Tour. Our season started out in Brasilia in Brazil, where due to our results at the end of the 2009 season we were already in the main draw, although it would have been very useful to had to have played the games in the qualification. 

The second stop on our tour was Shanghai, where we put together two good performances back-to-back against Austria and Russia to qualify for the main draw. We drew double Olympic gold medallist, Misty May Trainor, with her new partner, Nicole Branagh, in the first round and were with them until the third end change, where Misty’s experience finished off both sets in favour of the USA. 

We have since then been to Rome, Korea and Moscow where we were very disappointed with our performances, but these events highlighted things that needed to be taken back to Bath for further tinkering.  As a team we have always had the ambition to finish on the podium in Horse Guards Parade at the Olympics in London.  In the past two seasons we have shown we can compete with some of the top teams in the world.  These are the teams that we will have to beat to get onto the podium. We can do it. 

Last year at the FIVB World Tour Event in Kristiansand in Norway, Zara and I finished 9th in the tournament after beating a Norwegian team on centre court and then taking down the 8th seeded Brazilians in two sets. Just a taster of what we could do when we performed on the day.  Many people envy the job we do, travelling around to different cities and playing beach volleyball, but those same people sometimes are not aware of all the hard work we put in to be able to perform when we go to those tournaments. 

Every season there is on average 14 women’s events on the FIVB World Tour Calendar, and they take us to cities all over the world.  We train for four months, January to April; before the season starts, and spend from May through to September travelling do a different country every week competing on the World Tour. We will then usually have a month off before we get back into the hard grind in the gym, and on the sand preparing for the season ahead.  It’s an amazing experience. We know that.

Obviously, there are some disadvantages. We have had to become one with sand, as it is in our suitcases, clothes, beds and bags.  We can never escape it. Before I played beach volleyball nothing annoyed me more than get sandy while I was sunbathing on the beach. It is a privilege to do what we do, but travelling full-time can be tiresome. 

You know when you are travelling too much when you arrive back in the UK and the passport officer ask you where you have just come from, and your mind goes blank. Sometimes I need  to ask one of the other players where we have just come from. We have also had our fair share of missed flights, flight delays, lost baggage and forgetting to get off a ferry!! 

One of the major disadvantages of this job is not being able to see friends and family as much as we would like, thank goodness for Facebook and Skype as without them we would definitely struggle to keep in contact. 

The one thing that keeps us going is that Olympic goal. What makes it even sweeter is that the Olympic Games are at home in London. Not many athletes have the honour of competing in their home games. It is an opportunity to treasure and that is why no sacrifice is too great.

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