For those first-time readers, I'm in the British rowing team hoping to compete in this summer's Olympic Games - and when I say "summer", it feels a very long way off right now with snow on the ground and ice on the lake.

There will be plenty of updates in the weeks and months to come on how training is going, the battle for selection and the increasing excitement as we get closer and closer to an Olympic Games on home soil.

However, this month I thought I'd give you a more personal insight into what it's really like to row for your country, warts and all. Here are the bits that nobody ever seems to consider.....

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A common assumption made about my rowing career is that, as a Cornish girl, I must have started out in a pilot gig, and I was always ashamed to admit I'd never even tried it.

I put that right on a beautiful, still, late summer's evening in the estuary at Falmouth, which made a welcome change from the normally freezing mornings and biting winds when training with the GB squad on the Thames.

The scene was only enhanced by the wooden pilot gigs, each one named and painted in bright colours, and they really are beautiful constructions compared to the forgettable yellow and black plastic German-made shells that we race in.

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Losing.

I could have written a blog last year entitled "winning". This year, sadly, it is the opposite. I'm not going to sit and whinge about this being the worst result for my boat - the women's quadruple scull - since so and so, or my worst result since such and such.
This is not a list of statistics or a reeling off of clichés: this is a description of what it is like to lose, and how you deal with it.

The times and the race reports are available elsewhere - in essence, at this World Championships in Bled, Slovenia, we came third in a close race in our heat and thus had to race a repechage to attempt to reach the final. Again in the rep we came third in a close race and ended up having to contest the B-final for positions seven to 12 overall, with only one slot available to qualify a boat for the Olympics next year.

So in the space of five days we went from having high hopes of defending the world title we won in New Zealand last year, to having to scrap to gain the last Olympic qualifying spot and then to sit on the river bank to watch the Germans cross the line first in the A final, whooping and cheering.

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