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This blog comes to you from Lago di Varese in northern Italy, where we're putting the final touches to our preparation for the Olympic Games.

We transfer to Dorney Lake early next week with the Olympic regatta starting on Saturday morning.

The heats for the women's eight are scheduled to start the day after that, which leaves us the best part of a week before battle commences.

What we're trying to do out here is absolutely not to come up with a performance that will win us the Olympics.

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I'm writing this from Breisach am Rhein, the venue for our training camp in Germany. Breisach is where the women and lightweights come every year for our final work camp before the World Championships or Olympic Games - and when I say 'work camp' it truly lives up to its name through a familiar cocktail of weights, ergos and rowing.

We'll put in some serious volume as we build the engine to take us down the track at Dorney in about three weeks' time. Katie Greves worked out that we will have trained for something like 25 hours per Olympiad for every stroke we row in our Olympic final, and many of those hours will have been put in here, on the Rhine, in the steaming hot 'California of Germany', as the town mayor likes to call it (the resemblance based on it being a wine-producing region).

Throughout this final countdown, our focus narrows down to the absolute essentials of what is needed to produce our best race over 2000m on one day in August: and right now that's boat, team-mates, stopwatch, sugary carbohydrates, and sleep. Countries could invade each other, governments may rise and fall, the Higgs-Boson particle could turn up on Polzeath Beach for all I care - if it's not going to make my boat go faster, it's not relevant.

This is not to say I don't care about the outside world, but more to point out that as athletes we have a very small window of opportunity to get it right. We have one shot and if we mess it up there's no second chance, which means I can't afford to do anything other than keep my eye completely focused on the ball (or perhaps the oar) at the moment. During this time in 2008 there was a global banking crisis, with Lehman Brothers going bankrupt the month after the Olympics: was I aware of it at the time? No. I was training for Beijing.

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