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.

The final World Cup Regatta takes place in Poznan, Poland this weekend, but we won't be there. With just ourselves and Canada entered, there were not enough entries for it to be held.

So instead, we're going to race at the Marlow Regatta in the open quads event - as the only women in the field, or in fact the whole regatta!

We are really looking forward to it. It is a totally fresh take on racing. We have absolutely no idea how we will compare to our male opposition; we don't know how they will race, and we have no expectation of how far we'll get in the regatta.

Every man there will be out to get us, to make sure they don't get beaten by girls. It could be we are totally blown away, but it could be that our time together and the intensity of our training brings us through some of the less closely-knit combinations.

If we get through to the final both days, we will race more times in 22 hours this weekend than we have done in the whole of the rest of the season - so it's a great opportunity for us to test ourselves physically, and also try out different ways of racing, scenarios and mentalities. We will have to be absolutely on the ball, each one of us doing our job and role in the boat, and ready for anything.

We are used to racing men in training - we do a lot of our race preparations with the lightweight men's double - but it will be quite different to be surrounded by much larger guys on all sides.

We are also used to battling it out with one or maybe two crews at the World Cups, but this will be a different style of racing altogether, with challenges coming from all six lanes and all with a lot more testosterone!

Racing is always serious and never more so than this year, but hopefully it will also be a fun weekend. On the Saturday we will be racing against the Searle brothers, Johnny and Greg, who won Olympic Gold in Barcelona. What a challenge, to take on the people that inspired me to get into the sport, and throughout my junior career. Hopefully they will have lost a bit of their edge since then!

The weekend is also special because it's an opportunity for us to represent our clubs individually. Usually we can do this at the Head of the River races and sometimes at Henley, but this being Olympic year we have not been able to do any of these.

My club, the University of London, has provided me with absolutely invaluable coaching support since I left school, and also provided a perspective on the bigger picture – how much rowing is a sport to be enjoyed and the value of the camaraderie that the club atmosphere creates. I will be really proud to be wearing their colours on Saturday and Sunday.

It is very frustrating not to be able to race in Poland because we were very keen to go out against all the other women's quads again, and prove that Lucerne was not a performance at our usual level. But we will just have to wait until August for that now.

In a way, that is a good thing. We are working harder than ever to make the improvements to turn that result around, and that sense of urgency will stay with us until we get our opportunity in Beijing.

So, it is not quite Rowing World Cup Poland; but it is Marlow International Regatta, now known to us as The Fourth World Cup.