My training took seven years. I didn’t learn how to make sushi for the first three years. I only got two days off a month, and slept on the restaurant floor. But I loved the job. I’d go to the fish market every morning. I got to open the restaurant and see the customers. I’d watch my mentor making sushi and would copy him under the table, practising with my fingers.

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.

In the last 24 years that I have played for India I have made new friends, and before that I have had friends from my childhood. They have all had a terrific contribution. As and when I have called them to come and bowl to me at the nets, they have left their work aside to come and help me. Be it joining me on holidays and having discussions with me on cricket, or how I was a little stressed and wanting to find a solution so I can perform better. All those moments my friends were with me. Even for when I was injured, I would wake up in the morning because I couldn't sleep and thought that my career was over because of injuries, that is when my friends have woken up at 3 o'clock in the morning to drive with me and make me believe that my career was not over. Life would be incomplete without all those friends.

And so I ran. I ran up and down every court After every loose ball for you. You asked for my hustle I gave you my heart Because it came with so much more.

I do not think much of the accident or good luck theory of self-made men. It is worth but little attention and has no practical value. An apple carelessly flung into a crowd may hit one person, or it may hit another, or it may hit nobody. The probabilities are precisely the same in this accident theory of self-made men. It divorces a man from his own achievements, contemplates him as a being of chance and leaves him without will, motive, ambition and aspiration. Yet the accident theory is among the most popular theories of individual success.