Breaking Through the Payne Barrier

Open water swimming doesn’t sound much like the most appealing of sports when described by Olympic medalist Keri-Anne Payne. Rivalries and competitive events can be an intense and hostile process with competitors battling furiously through choppy waters as close together as possible.

Taking these combative positions is important for conserving energy to utilize in the mêlée for the finishing line. Turning buoys can become a furious skirmish of limb-pulling, elbow-thrashing and costume-grabbing, but Payne would not change it for the world.

“It’s all part and parcel of the event,” Payne acknowledges. “You have to go in there expecting that. If you do one wrong stroke one way, you can swim into someone. There is nothing you can do about it – nine times out of ten it just happens, but in the circuit you know who to stay away from. There are a few with a reputation.”

On the rare occasion she evades the physical scuffling of her rivals, Payne is forced to swim under some of the most strenuous conditions imaginable. When she isn’t faced with the often over zealous limb-throwing of other competitors, she has contended with jellyfish in Melbourne, dead dogs in China and found herself on the wrong side of shark nets in Hong Kong.

“I do prefer pool swimming,” she understandably concedes. “It’s where I started, it’s where my heart is. I only got into open water four years ago, whereas I’ve been swimming in the pool since I was four.”

Accepting her coaches challenge to “have a go” at the 10-kilometer event is a decision the 22-year-old must regret at times. The transition from the chlorinated safety of the pool to the hazardous abyss of open water cannot have been an easy one – though Payne certainly has made it seem so. Second only to Russian Larisa Ilchenko by a single stroke, Payne dramatically secured a silver medal at the Beijing Olympics in the 10-kilometer event.

“It’s difficult. I’m not trying to blow my own trumpet, but you have to have a certain amount of talent to chop and change things so much,” she insists. “I’ve always had a big distance background behind me, but I do have a certain amount of raw speed in my system anyway.”

Despite Payne’s evident natural ability, possessing talent is only a fraction of the battle for any serious distance swimmer. The remaining struggle is maintaining a certain mental toughness, an unflinching dedication to the sport and a gritty willingness to train long and socially awkward hours. One of the difficulties for any multi-event swimmer is the delicate selection procedure when prioritising certain races and developing a specific training schedule.

Such a problem only becomes exponentially more acute with the broad range of Payne’s event list. As a medley swimmer in the pool, she must train to swim distances of 200 and 400 metres, training for events that take just minutes to complete. As a 10-kilometre swimmer in open water, she must cover extraordinary distances to prepare her for a race that takes hours to finish. Her schedule must train her to compete at the leisure centre and in the lake - for 2 minutes and for 2 hours.

“It’s difficult,” she confesses. “I train the pool events and hope that will transfer over into the 10-kilometre, which it does. You have to be so fit to swim the 400 metres, so it’s a nice progression from that to the 10-kilometre.”

With Payne and team-mate Cassie Patten emerging from the Shunyi Park rowing lake dripping with silver and bronze at 2008’s Beijing Olympics, the focus of one eye undoubtedly shifted to London 2012. The race is scheduled for the shark-free Serpentine, Hyde Park - a venue far less hostile than many of the courses she has experienced in the past.

“Even from a year ago, the water quality has changed,” Payne excitedly reveals. “It’s a lot better and we’ve still got two years to go until the water clarity has to be perfect. It’s brilliant – I’m really pleased.”

British athletes enjoyed unprecedented success with a haul of 19 golds in Beijing - amidst the enthusiasm sweeping the nation following the unexpected success of Britain’s Olympic bid, Payne evidently recognizes the significance of home advantage.

“It will be really good to have that home support,” she suggests. “You can already feel it to be honest. People are already talking about it and there is a lot more media attention. Normally, we’re the foreigners, so it will be really good to finally have 10,000 people in the stands cheering for you.”

She recently lost the world championship title she won in the choppy Tyrrhenian Sea off the Italian coast, finishing eighth in the 2010 event, though Payne insists she is keen to learn from every experience.

“Unfortunately I lost my world championship title, which I was gutted about. It was such a long year, actually a year and a month this season, whereas it’s usually about 10 months. The Commonwealth’s ended up being a slow event and because it was so long, once we’d finished we were all ready for a break.

“We halved the number of sessions in the pool we did, doing much more in the gym. I know now that I need to be swimming fit, not just generally fit. I can run as much as I want, but I need to be fit in the pool. I need to make sure I’m getting a feel of the water.”

Still two years away, the 2012 games lurk tantalizingly on the horizon – an opportunity for each and every athlete of all disciplines to thrust themselves into a frenzy of public adulation. For Keri-Anne Payne, her vision is not quite fixed upon a point so far away. Allowing her head to rule her heart, she humbly insists that she must “first of all make the team”.

With her feet grounded firmly on dry land, diving into the water at the Serpentine in 2012 will allow her to bloody her nose and blacken her eye once more, only this time on home soil at the greatest show on Earth.

�

�

Keri-Anne Payne is a Speedo Ambassador – for more information please visit www.speedo.co.uk