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.

I’m glad now I did it. It took up all my middle years. I started it in 1972, and I published it in 1988, and my middle years all went into it, but I am glad I put them into it. Otherwise I’d have just been writing newspaper stories. It’s a worthy profession. It’s a good profession, but the newspaper, after it’s published, is something to wrap the fodder in the next day. ... A book sits on the shelf, and I really wanted to do this. I’m glad that I had done it.

However, it was very natural that a failed surgeon with little experience in molecular biology had a hard time finding a position. A turning point came when I got a fax from Thomas Innerarity at the Gladstone Institute of Cardiovascular Diseases in San Francisco. After a short telephone conversation, Tom was brave enough to give me a postdoctoral position in his lab! Working at Gladstone was one of the best decisions I ever made in my life.

And like most nurses, I found myself running into certain frustrations. I started to look for ways to make a better argument, to advocate more convincingly for the people under my care. That led me to read up on civil law and produce a few research papers, and then I did a master’s degree in health science and also an MBA. All of that allowed me to see other sides of the problem. It also showed me how issues affecting nurses could be elevated by approaching ministers and other people in power with sound, evidence-based arguments.

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.

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.

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.