As some of you are aware, I’m a physiotherapy student at the University of Birmingham. Last year I put my degree on hold to try and make the Olympics in the Team Pursuit. It was always a long shot and despite being one of the most improved teams on the track last season, the team failed to gain any Olympic qualification points in Astana put this goal just that little bit too far out of reach.

I always maintained that, if possible, I would like to complete my degree and in January I started back at university. Thankfully, my university are being incredibly supportive and allowing me to do my degree part time, which enables me to continue training at the level I already do and complete my degree. By no means is it easy, but it is achievable.

I started a hospital placement at the beginning of January so was straight in at the deep end! I was incredibly nervous about starting back but thankfully I have a very lovely team of people around me on my placement that are all very supportive and understanding of my sport.

So… my life now consists of training, revision, my placement and work. It has given me a new appreciation for how much time there actually is in the day and makes me wonder what on earth I did with my time when I was just training full time. I’ve always worked alongside my sport so I did a lot more of that until now, but I’m a lot more disciplined with my time and seem to have a to-do list most days.

At the moment I’m in the middle of a very hard block of training and I seem to feel pretty tired all the time, but I know the results will show. I’ve finally started doing weights sessions and am combining this with a lot of endurance work as well as managing to make it to the track. So it is definitely full on.

Despite the odd moan, I secretly love the DOMS (Delayed On-set of Muscle Soreness for those of you that aren’t familiar with the term) feeling from all the hard work! Weird? Maybe, but then I’ve always loved training hard and often have to be told to ‘relax and go easy when it’s easy’.

So, what’s next for me? I’m really hoping to have secured a World Championship spot in the Individual Pursuit and Points race… and there are plenty of other goals for the season… so watch this space.