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.

I’ve rarely rowed in worse weather than we did on Monday at our base in Caversham near Reading.

We were so drenched I had puddles of water collating around my hips and my body was squelching against my thighs as we came up the slide.

But every day can provide an opportunity to improve, and with the second of only three World Cup regattas upon us already, we’ll grab every opportunity we can get, come rain or shine, bank holiday or no bank holiday, to move on.

I can hardly believe we are almost half way through the racing season already. By the end of this weekend I will have done half of all the races I am going to do this year.

The regatta this weekend takes place on the Rotsee in Lucerne, one of the most beautiful rowing venues in the world. It is known as the Lake of the Gods, surrounded by snow-capped mountains, but the racing on the water will be no less fierce for its idyllic surroundings.

We already know we will be facing tougher opposition than in Munich as the Chinese have put their two top doubles into one super quad, and the Germans will be gaining momentum as they spend more time together as a crew.

This will also probably be the last regatta where we will race the Chinese before the Olympic Games, so we will be taking them on with extra vigour and to see if the work we have done in the past couple of weeks really has made us faster.

Although I know the racing will be extremely intense, I prefer not to think about how much it will hurt.

If I worried about what I was going to have to do to deliver that, I would never be able to actually do it. I have to blank those thoughts from my mind and just focus on the process, on all the smaller elements of how I am going to row, and how I am going to commit myself to each part of the race.

It is on these points that we concentrate between regattas. We can’t get a lot fitter in two-and-a-half weeks, but we can learn to row better.

Quad sculling really is about making the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The boat speed comes more from how the crew row and work together than the individuals themselves, so a lot of speed can be found just through fine tuning in our technique and bringing us more together.

Improvements are hard-earned though. I have been doing this for a few years now, and all my habits are quite ingrained and every change, no matter how small – a degree shorter here, or longer there – can feel like a huge exaggeration.

“How can it be so hard to get it just right?” I always ask myself, but for every time I think how frustrating it is I also tell myself: “I want this so much, just make the change”.

One of my first coaches said to me: “The pain of racing lasts for seven minutes, but the pain of losing lasts for years.” And it’s true.

We’ll put ourselves through whatever it takes to cross that line first and have it hurt less – even if that means spending all afternoon clutching a hot water bottle to dry out again!