What is rewarding about the priesthood is, one, that you have an incredible privilege of being privy to some of the most extraordinary things about people. I mean, as their parish priest, you visit people who are sick, say, on their death bed and they tell you things that they probably have not shared with any other person. You are privileged to bring the Holy Sacrament to people at a time when they are probably at their lowest. But you also have the privilege of meeting up with people at their moment of great joy, when they are getting married, or when they have a child baptized.

I decided that my attention would be in the dining room. I haven’t cooked in 28 years at Chez Panisse. ... I didn’t intend to be out of the kitchen. ... Now I’m in a different world and I contribute to the collaboration of the kitchen and I’m always working with a group of colleagues who inspire me, but I really miss being actually in the solving of the performance, that effort to really come up with dishes that are delicious and right.

After four knee surgeries and hundreds of shots injected into my knee weekly to alleviate swelling and pain, my body is begging me to stop the pounding. My previous three surgeries were on my right knee. My most recent knee surgery took place this July and was on my left knee.

I was living in survival mode when I was young. I'm now trying to teach the people to live in a mentality that they can be whatever they want to be even though the situation around them is hopeless.

I might have liked to have done it a couple of years later, but you'd be stupid to turn it down.

I love training. It's not just about the competing. I had an amount of natural talent – you need that to go so far – but, actually, what I had, I think, is an ability to make myself work hard, to do the things I didn't like doing, to do the things that I wasn't so good at.

In the whole of my career, there were very few training sessions that I missed. Even when I was pregnant, I trained all the way through. I was back training when my daughter was two weeks old. You've got to commit to this, because it can be really easy to walk away from the track, convince yourself, "Oh, well, I'll do it tomorrow, I'll catch up". You can't and what I say is it's all pennies in the bank. When I say that to my daughter, she rolls her eyes at me, but you put a couple of pennies in every day and when it matters, then you've got this bank to call on, as opposed to you can't stick them all in two weeks before.

One thing that I did was race against the British men a lot and they used to push me round the road; they used to make my life really hard but then when I was racing against the best women in the world, I'd been through just about every experience you could imagine. I remember this one race – a half marathon – where my husband literally pushed me into every kerb he could find, he pushed me into every corner, you know, messed around and tried to drop me out the back of the pack. Then when you're in a race that really matters, if that happens, you've got the skills to deal with it… you need to have practised everything you possibly could in the lead up to it.