If there’s one thing I’ve always loved, it’s water — pool, sea, bath, you name it. Swimming has always been the only sport I was any good at, but I’d settled firmly into my cosy breaststroke comfort zone. So in September, I signed up for adult lessons to finally tackle front crawl. Since then, I’ve gone from spluttering through a few shaky lengths to confidently swimming 65 lengths twice a week. Not bad for someone who mostly splashed around in the sea during summer and called it “training.”

So naturally, the next logical step was… a 24-hour wild-swimming relay in a lake. In the cold. At night. With a team of eight incredible women who somehow believe I can do this — and I’ve decided to believe them too. I’ve barely dipped a toe into cold-water lake swimming before, so this challenge sits somewhere between “exciting personal growth” and “what on earth have I signed up for?”

But that’s exactly why I’m doing it. To push myself. To dive (literally) into something new. And to raise money for a fantastic cause along the way.