That’s me in the middle. The one nervously wading out into a river at the start of her first ever triathlon. My brain was telling me to turn round, head back to the car park and go home. To run and save myself because this was a stupid idea. I didn’t belong here – I wasn’t a triathlete. I wasn’t a swimmer.

I was nervous about how the swim would go, and the swim would go very badly because of my nerves. I stayed too close to the edge and got caught up in weeds. I kept stopping to catch my breath because my nervousness made breathing more difficult. It took me longer than planned to finish the swim because of all this, and when I did emerge from the water I was tired and disorientated. But I did finish.

To quote the long-serving Runners World columnist John Bingham: “The miracle isn’t that I finished, it’s that I had the courage to start.”

I couldn’t swim nine months before this picture was taken. The courage to start began when I turned up for my first swimming lesson. When my coach told me to take off the nose clip that I was insistent I needed because water up my nose gave me massive headaches. But I trusted her, and she was right.

I trusted her again when she answered a question from one of the guys on the course asked about when we’d realistically be able to take on a triathlon. Her answer was: “You‘ll be able to do a sprint distance in about six months. Olympic about a year from now and a half-iron next autumn.”

We laughed at this last one. P’ah, half-iron triathlon. No chance.

But she was right about the sprint triathlon and right about the Olympic – I finished both bang on schedule. And hopefully she’s right about the half-iron too. Because that’s what I’ll be doing on Sunday. I’ll be lowering myself into the water at Hever Castle, hopefully with more confidence than I had for my first triathlon. I’ll wish I was elsewhere as my hands and feet sting from cold of the water for those first few minutes. But as the canon sounds to signal the start of the race, I’ll have the courage to start. And that’s often the hardest part.