Always carry a notebook. And I mean always. The short-term memory only retains information for three minutes; unless it is committed to paper you can lose an idea for ever.

Long years ago, sometimes it seems many lives ago, I was at Oxford listening to the radio programme Desert Island Discs with my young son Alexander. It was a well-known programme (for all I know it still continues) on which famous people from all walks of life were invited to talk about the eight discs, the one book beside the bible and the complete works of Shakespeare, and the one luxury item they would wish to have with them were they to be marooned on a desert island.

If I don't do that with the bottles, then I sit down, I could be thinking of something else. If I do always the same things, it means that I am focused and I'm alert to think purely about tennis.

I mean, I still work alone. Really — I work alone in my house, often in my bathrobe. When a photographer shows up, I dress up, so I have clothes on. And that's how I've always worked.

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

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.

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.

We were training 12 to 15 times a week, 50 weeks of the year. I think sometimes people see you compete at the Paralympics or other amazing places around the world and think that is what you do all the time. There is an element of that, but a lot of it is just really boring and repetitive. The vast majority of your time as an athlete is spent on the road or in the gym.