'When it becomes brutal, I just kick harder'

13 April 2012

It's a cool London morning. Occasionally, the sun pops out from behind the low-lying cloud and the Serpentine intermittently glistens.

In the centre of that giant pool of water, which will play host to the marathon swimming for London 2012, Keri-Anne Payne glides along making her event look effortless.

It is anything but - certainly not one of the glamour sports of next year's Games. The water is cold, the event as a whole sounds like torture and, when it comes to 2012, the Serpentine will be more akin to an underwater boxing ring as Payne jockeys with her rivals for a position out in front.

Out of her swimming gear and seemingly dressed for a night on the town, the 23-year-old looks incapable of the argy bargy required to keep on top of her peers. But she clearly is - she won silver at the last Olympics and a year later was crowned world champion.

With her model looks, Payne makes the sport an easy sell although the way she describes it, it becomes less tempting. "It's hard," she says, somewhat understatedly with a smile.

"At the end of a race, your stomach shrinks to the size of a pea, your muscles are screaming for you to stop but you just have to keep pushing through that and kick harder. It's quite brutal.

"The feeling when you come out of the water depends on where you've finished. I remember after Beijing I was just flying and it wasn't until I went to bed that night that I realised how exhausted I was. But I remember after a swim in New York when I came second-last I could barely move for a week and there's no real reason for that."

It's worth pointing out the aforementioned swim along the Hudson River in the Big Apple ended with Payne looking like she had just been embroiled in a fight. She was nursing a black eye and bleeding nose, an indication of how harsh her particular event can be.

There was no stewards' inquiry over her war wounds and there is no malice on her part towards those responsible for the injuries, partly because Payne seems incapable of malice but mainly because the injuries are part and parcel of the sport. "Nine times out of 10 these things are accidental," she says. "You have 50 girls all trying to get to the same point as you so you're going to hit somebody by accident.

"You normally don't know who it is. Sometimes it's intentional and you might go over and have a word after the race. There are some swimmers you try to avoid, that's just how it is."

What's remarkable is that Payne allows herself to sustain such blows despite the fact that open-water swimming is not her first love.

For one, she has a fear of sharks and in deep, dark open water, always worries they are lurking beneath her. Her No1 love is the swimming pool and she has every intention of doubling up at 2012, much as she did in Beijing.

"My heart is in the pool, that's what I've been doing since four years old," she adds. "That's why I carry on doing it. The open water is not the only thing I want to do."

The problem for Payne is that her best event in the pool - the 1,500m for which she is the British record holder - is not an Olympic discipline and, when she instead turns her attention to the 800m, she is up against her close friend Becky Adlington, the Olympic champion over that distance.

"I'd love to make the team for that and it's no means a fact that I'm not good enough, it's just we've got a great group of girls," she says.

Her relationship with open water began in South Africa - she was born in Johannesburg - with her sport-mad family, who still compete in the events, although she did not take up open-water swimming at the top level until her coach suggested it in 2006 and she "skeptically agreed". Payne loved growing up there but safety fears - particularly with two daughters approaching their early teens - meant her English parents opted to relocate the family back to Manchester where she has lived ever since.

"There were lots of reasons for coming back but I don't think my parents wanted to have two young girls growing up there," she says. "Dad missed his family as well. Thankfully I loved Manchester and still love it."

She lives in an area which houses a host of footballers. She recalls having seen Rio Ferdinand and Carlos Tevez but admits "I don't recognise most of them, David has to point them out to me". The David in question is her fiance, David Carry, another member of the British swimming team bidding to make his mark at next year's Games.

The couple first met at a British training camp and the romance steadily blossomed. He popped the question at the couple's home last July and they will tie the knot in a post-2012 wedding next September.

"The proposal was unexpected," adds Payne, who is sporting a sparkling engagement ring designed by Carry and his brother at the family jewellers. "I knew I would marry him one day but I'd not even thought about getting engaged. He was being a bit strange on the day. I hadn't spoken to him in three days - it was quite funny. I got home and plonked my swimming bag down but I put it down on top of the ring and he was like, 'What are you doing?'

"I realised what was going on and I went to give him a hug. But he started to choke up and sort of said, 'Go away, go away'. He then got down on one knee and proposed."

She describes them as "similar and very different at the same time". She adds: "David is focused on what he wants and getting things done for us while I always sweep up behind him trying to keep everybody happy."

The venue is already booked for the big day and the wedding dress bought and Payne admits to very much having got wedding fever, further spurned on by the recent royal nuptials.

With the backdrop of the Princess Diana Memorial in Hyde Park, the conversation turns to the wedding of Prince William and Kate Middleton, for which Payne went to town. She made Pimm's jelly, marmalade pudding and cupcakes. "It was so exciting to watch that and to showcase what we can do as a nation," she says. "It made me feel proud to be British."

Payne's wedding is going to be a tad lower key but is perhaps the perfect post-Games focus. British Olympians bemoaned the post-Beijing comedown three years ago but, with an impending wedding and honeymoon, that shouldn't be a problem for the future Mrs Carry.

She allows herself to cast her mind past the Games but not to the Games themselves. After a swim in Israel earlier this month, she has already qualified for this year's World Championships in Shanghai in July.

There, her sole goal will be to finish in the top 10 to guarantee Olympic qualification. "The worlds are all about making the Olympic team," she says. "I'll swim as hard as I can and I want to win but the Olympics is the No1.

"It was a great achievement to be world champion in 2009 but being a part of the Olympics was amazing. To win silver that day was fantastic and I'd like to go for the gold this time."

Beijing was only her fifth or sixth open-water swim, which makes the silver medal all the more remarkable. Her first had taken place in Melbourne in 2006 and she came out of the water covered in jellyfish stings. This year, she will do just two 10km swims - the one she has already done in Israel and the worlds in Shanghai, and she plans to do a few more before 2012.

"Some swimmers do open-water events to prepare but I do my training in the pool," she says. "The swimming's not hugely different. The start is different but it's essentially the same thing."

She will make appearances in shorter open-water races this year as the poster girl of the British Gas Great Swim Series, which has events dotted all over the UK, including one in Royal Victoria Dock on 2 July. Payne showed her form in one of them last Sunday, when winning the Great Salford Swim title.

A year on and the capital looks set to define her career. She has not made concrete plans for her working life post-2012 but is doing a journalism course and has plans to work in television.

Of her future, she says: "Everyone keeps telling me you know when the time is right to stop but there's no pressure to make decisions right now. Of course, I'd love to have kids as I'm a real family person but I'd love to have a career outside of swimming first."

Keri-Anne Payne is a British Gas ambassador. The 2011 British Gas Great Swim Series takes place at five locations across the UK between 15 May and 24 September. Visit www.greatswim.org

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