Frances Houghton has won gold in the women’s quadruple scull in each of the last three World Rowing Championships and in August will look to better her Olympic silver from 2004.

The 27-year-old from Oxford will be writing regularly on 606 to given an insight into her bid for gold in Beijing.

This week we are heading to Munich for our first World Cup regatta of the season. It has been a long winter and it really does feel like we are emerging from lengthy, racing-starved, hibernation.

The World Cups are a bit like the Golden League series in athletics – except without the money, gold bars, and Mercedes.

The three meetings, in Munich, Lucerne and Poznan are about three weeks apart, and at the end of it the crews with the most points in their events are awarded the title of World Cup Series Winner.

Although this is a title we will definitely be aiming for, the main objective of these races is to test ourselves, at each individual opportunity, against the crews that we will face at the Olympics in August.

We have emerged from the winter’s training and testing to be racing as the same crew again for this World Cup but it has been the hardest and most intense journey I’ve ever been through just to get this far, back into the same seat again.

There are seven scullers in the women’s squad all with World Championship medals, five with Olympic medals, and we have been battling it out against each other since three weeks after last year’s World Championships for positions in the quad and the double.

It has all been so close and no final decisions on the crew line-ups will be made until just before the team leaves for Beijing, so at the moment we are all just trying to make the boats we are in go as fast as possible at every opportunity.

Munich holds a special significance for us as a crew as this is where we won the World Championships last September.

As the exact same line up (Annie Vernon, Debbie Flood, myself, and Katherine Grainger), we will definitely be aiming for a similar, if not, improved level of performance this time.

We have a very strong field entered with the first four finishers in the World Championship final as well as another very strong Chinese crew containing their world champion double scullers.

We know that we will have to be on our best form right from the start in order to set our season off on the right foot.

As a crew we are all very different people. Annie, at bow, is a Cornish girl through and through. She sells us beef from her parents’ farm and makes us amazing lucky pasties before each race.

She is also always very proud of the fact that if we win she is the one that crosses the line first!

Debbie, at two, is the one giving the calls in training and racing, so she is boss, but a very nice boss in a non-bossy way.

Sometimes her dog, Charlie, follows us down the course in training, running along the tow path, and then takes our shoes from the landing stage and hides them, which makes him slightly un-popular!

I am supposedly the quiet one, at three, but I can’t help but let the others know what I’m thinking from time to time...

And Katherine, at stroke, is the most experienced and wisest of us all, she sets the rhythm and pace that the three of us behind her back up.

It is an amazing position to be in to have won the three consecutive World Championships since Athens (and one I would never have dreamed of being in), but the Olympic Games are something else.

As a crew we see this challenge as a totally fresh one. We will of course be using everything that we have learnt together so far, but are conscious that the standards we looked to last year will have to be pushed further forward again for us to achieve success in Beijing.

Part of this process, is that we take this season just one race, one day, one session, at a time, in order to be the best that we can be.

Munich is the first in a series of stepping stones and we will be using each session we are out there on the water to try and improve and prepare as well as possible for whatever may unfold for our heat on Friday first of all.

Watch out for everyone else in GB colours too – especially our training partners on the water, the men’s lightweight double scull (they go almost exactly the same speed as a women’s quad).

There is also the lightweight men’s four who are reigning World Champions, and the women’s double and eight - both bronze medal crews from last year. And the heavyweight men as always. I think that’s almost everyone!