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.

Watch on the BBC website: Women’s quad final in Munich | Post-race interviews with Frances and her crew

We are back at the top of the World Cup points table both as a team and a crew, and what an awesome feeling it is.

Between us we won five gold medals and two silvers in the opening World Cup regatta of the season in Munich.

Alan Campbell won the men’s single, which is the kind of success and achievement I don’t even dream of.

The men’s double of Steve Rowbotham and Matt Wells also won gold, as did the men’s four – who were back to their dominating ways - and our training partners the men’s lightweight double.

There was silver for the men’s eight and lightweight men’s four, which I know they are very frustrated about, but it’s still an awesome start to Olympic year.

Our final on Sunday was almost a re-run of the World Championship final eight months ago and, with the first result of our Olympic season at stake, everyone was going to be out there to get us.

It was a long day. Between our warm-up row and the actual race there was about six hours of thinking, but trying not to think too much; relaxing (or pretending to be relaxed), asking myself why on earth I do this to myself (and reminding myself why).

Back in my hotel room I tried to avoid reading my book because if its un-focused main protagonist and found a sudoku instead to keep me on the ball.

When we arrived at the course, I had about an hour of juggling the thoughts in my head between calming myself down and gearing myself up.

One voice in my head was shrieking, “Row as hard as you can”, while the other was insisting, “Relax, row well”. Somehow I had to get them to reconcile, I knew I was going to have to do both in equal measure.

Half an hour before race time we took to the water to start our warm up. This is when the emotions are running at their highest and the voices in your head are thumping at the sides of your brain.

At least this time for some reason my nerves didn’t make me feel absolutely exhausted like they normally do. I took this as a good sign.

At 1406 local time the red light turned to green and we were off. When I glanced around after about a minute I saw we had got out to an early advantage.

It was not as much as sometimes but this didn’t faze us, we knew everyone would have spent time trying to improve their speed here to match us.

We just took it one stroke at a time, and made sure we got into a really good rhythm that would take us away bit by bit through the middle of the course.

There had been a lot of talk about the headwind and the race being long, but I didn’t really notice it. It was still a 2000m race, and our boat felt light.

The Chinese were strongest in the first quarter – and very loud, yelling away at each other - but we steadily drew away from them in the second 500m.

We were not quite clear of the Germans when they put in their big push to get back in touch just after the half-way mark, but it was not enough to give them a sense of us again and we took to opportunity to move away again.

Coming into the last 500m we knew we had a good margin and didn’t need to throw everything at it, we just had to hold our concentration and keep everything under control.

We had prepared ourselves for an all-out, blood-and-guts battle down to the finish line, so we enjoyed this rare luxurious feeling in the last 200m.

If only all races were like this.

Our next one is in Lucerne, in three weeks’ time. We know both the Germans and Chinese can put out stronger crews, so we will be spending every training session on and off the water between now and then to move on both technically and physically.

We’ll be doing everything we can to get that winning feeling again.