The attractions of an easy life are lost on Debbie Flood. The Yorkshire-born oarswoman has spent the past 11 years living the uniquely ascetic life of an international rower and chasing dreams of Olympic glory. In 2004 in Athens she was rewarded with a silver medal in the quadruple sculls. Later this month in the same boat she hopes to be part of the first British women's crew to return from an Olympic regatta bearing gold.
Win or lose in Beijing, at the end of the season the 28-year-old will set aside her athletic ambitions for 12 months, trading Lycra and dawn training for a prison officer's uniform and early shifts on the wings. Flood plans to spend a year working full-time for the prison service before going part-time in 2010 to give herself a shot at competing at the London Olympics.
It is a singular career departure for an international athlete but Flood is a singular competitor. She was raised in a sporty, Christian family in Yorkshire and as a teenager was good enough at judo to be selected for the national youth squad.
She excelled at athletics too but it was a casual session on a rowing machine at her marathon-running father's gym that revealed a life-changing aptitude for rowing. Encouraged by her father to explore her potential, a summer course with Tideway Scullers at Eton College aged 16 confirmed a rare athletic ability and she has devoted herself to the sport ever since.
She is equally committed to her faith, and is a vocal member of Christians In Sport, an organisation that works to overcome the coyness about religion that is characteristic of British sport.
Speaking on the day her selection for Beijing was confirmed at the team's training base at Caversham, she beamed with the sort of healthy wellbeing that comes courtesy of years of self-denial and a training regime requiring total commitment, and explained the inspiration for her unlikely career change.
"When I came back from Athens I ended up going into a lot of school visits, doing assemblies and talks and I got it into my heart that I would like to work with kids," she said.
"I started doing mentoring work with kids who were three or four years below where they should have been academically. I would sit in the class and there would be disruptive kids and I thought, well of course you have to chuck them out of the class because they are disrupting the others, but what do you do with them then?
"I decided then that I wanted to work with disruptive kids in some form. I think it is either something you can or you can't cope with, so I decided to put myself in the most extreme position that I could so I did some work at a young offenders' institution. I realised I could cope with it, so I decided to try it full-time."
Clearly her faith has played a part in enabling her to cope the rigours of such a demanding profession. She is unabashed about her belief and discusses it with a frankness not always heard from athletes of faith.
"My faith is really important to me. I look back on my life and see that I have been put in these places which appear to be random, but as I see it I have found something that I am really good at and God has put me here as a witness for him. He has got my life in his hands and this is where he is taking me," she said.
"I'm quite lucky, everyone in my team knows that I am a Christian but they see that I am just a normal person, I get on with my rowing, I train hard, I'm not strange because I'm a Christian but I believe in God and it's a big part of my life."
Before Flood departs for the cell blocks there is the question of whether she and her three team-mates can finally end Britain's wait for a women's gold. They are part of the first British team in 24 years to attend an Olympic regatta without Sir Steve Redgrave or Matthew Pinsent in its ranks, and there is a strong desire among the class of '08 to establish a legacy of their own.
They are fancied by many, Redgrave included, to win gold and on present form and their record since Athens they have an outstanding chance.
Two of the present squad - Frances Houghton and Flood - collected silver medals in the boat in 2004 alongside Alison Mowbray and Rebecca Romero. Mowbray has since retired and Romero is now a cycling medal prospect here. They were replaced by Annie Vernon and Katherine Grainger - who won a silver medal in the coxless pair in Athens.
The replacements have helped maintain the team's competitiveness and in 2006 and 2007 they were world champions. They have been defeated in a World Cup regatta by the Chinese this season but remain favourites for gold.
The expectation does not appear to hang heavy. "There is a lot of pressure on us but the internal pressure we put on ourselves and each other in the crew is just as significant," Flood said.
"We expect 100% from each other. That's the sort of pressure we are used to every day and every year. The external pressure from the press, from friends and family and the supporters is not something we are used to and we are going to have to learn to deal with that and use it."
Flood will take her seat at No2 in the boat only after a protracted battle with Sarah Winckless, now a member of the women's eight, that is typical of the internal competition fostered by the performance director David Tanner. All winter the candidates for Olympic boats have been racing one another in single sculls, being constantly monitored to identify the fastest, strongest oarswomen. Flood has relished the competitive environment.
"I've been fighting for this seat since October and it's been up and down because you never have a perfect winter, but it's really good for the team to have competition and to have people snapping at your heels," she said.
Should Flood and her team-mates be successful in Beijing it will have less to do with divine inspiration than worldly graft. Rowers follow a testing regime training six hours a day in all weathers with little prospect of fame and fortune at the end of it. The goal is glory and for Flood that is more than enough, particularly if it establishes British women as a world force in the sport.
"People see the races on TV and think 'That must be hard' but they don't see the work that goes into it. We train in all weathers seven days a week with just three weeks a year off after the summer. We don't have weekends, we don't have lie-ins, we train in the sun and the wind and the rain and the hail and it is not easy.
"And then it all comes down to one race, and you have to get it right. In a sense I will have been training for 11 years for one six-minute race. How much more pressure can you get than that?"
On a Redgrave mission
Steve Redgrave, Britain's five-time Olympic champion, has two reasons for wanting to see the women's quad triumph in Beijing. Firstly, he believes a women's gold would give his sport a huge fillip in Britain. His second motivation is more personal, as one of the GB quad's chief rivals for gold is the German crew led by the four-time Olympic champion Kathrin Boron. The German won three of her medals in a pair (1992, 2000 and 2004) and one in the quad (1996) and a repeat would give Boron a fifth gold to match Redgrave's famous career haul.
"I'm extremely excited about the quad's prospects but it is going to be tough. They are co-favourites with the Chinese, and the Germans will come out stronger than they did at the last World Cup races," said Redgrave, adding with a smile: "You have Kathrin Boron in the German quad and she is going for her fifth Olympic gold medal, so it's very important they don't win."
Happily, Redgrave believes Debbie Flood and her team-mates can protect his record by taking the gold. "Women's rowing in Britain needs a gold medal to underline its growing strength," he said. "The first time it was in the Games was 1976 but we didn't get a medal until 2000."
