Nothing comes to my desk that is perfectly solvable. … Otherwise, someone else would have solved it. So you wind up dealing with probabilities. Any given decision you make you'll wind up with a 30 to 40 percent chance that it isn't going to work. You have to own that and feel comfortable with the way you made the decision. You can't be paralyzed by the fact that it might not work out.

Treat writing as a job. Be disciplined. Lots of writers get a bit OCD-ish about this. Graham Greene famously wrote 500 words a day. Jean Plaidy managed 5,000 before lunch, then spent the afternoon answering fan mail. My minimum is 1,000 words a day – which is sometimes easy to achieve, and is sometimes, frankly, like shitting a brick, but I will make myself stay at my desk until I’ve got there, because I know that by doing that I am inching the book forward. Those 1,000 words might well be rubbish – they often are. But then, it is always easier to return to rubbish words at a later date and make them better.

Now my job is to defend everybody. But I don’t mind. Because I travel, and I like to talk to people and really listen to them. And I have no prejudices. I figured out a long time ago that, whatever I think I know, I don’t know anything. Once I realized that, I really started learning. That’s a great strength: I know that I don’t know.

It looked like an agricultural frame, something you might grow peas up – a lot of wires and cables strung from posts over a space the size of 57 tennis courts. It was actually built to study radio emission from quasars. I built the prototype and then six of us took two years to build the real thing.

I don't enjoy it but I know that I have got to live with [myself] if I'm not going to give it 100 per cent. The key thing is getting to the start line and knowing that I couldn't have done any more, that I didn't back off. You accept the pain, because if you didn't there would always be that element of doubt.

Jason Queally, a former teammate. He is older than me and was Olympic champion in Sydney. The way he mentored me, even though he knew I would be a rival, was amazing.

Delivering papers in the freezing cold for my granny. I got paid in Panini football stickers, so it wasn’t all bad.

Max Levy, a German sprint cyclist who came second behind me a lot.

Scotland’s rugby captain. My hero Gavin Hastings was captain when he came to our school for a training session when I was 10 or 11. I met him and was blown away.

The real problem is that the pain actually gets worse. You have created massive acidosis in your muscles so there is a huge quantity of hydrogen ions and the pH in your blood changes. For 15 minutes you lie there thinking, "God, this is really bad. I'm going to die. It has never been this bad before." And every time you think exactly the same thing. You have to lie to yourself by saying you're not doing a second set. Then, without moving for 15 minutes, almost to the second, I would roll over and think, "OK, I think I can do a second set now." During those sessions I have never felt more alive or so close to death.