STOREY TO BE TOLD

There is a moment somewhere around six minutes into a 12-minute maximal-effort test, where your legs feel like inanimate, disconnected objects, your mouth is dry, your heart is thumping and oxygen seems in desperately short supply. It takes a supreme effort just to keep the pedals on the static Wattbike turning, as at each moment your legs threaten to simply stop of their own accord.

My lungs are burning and the heart-rate monitor is registering alarmingly high numbers the likes of which an average amateur like me didn’t realise they were capable of. Measuring a cycling effort over 12 minutes isn’t easy, and I can’t say I did a great job, though I certainly didn’t ‘leave anything on the bike’, as our coach and tormentor, and Britain’s most successful Paralympian of all time, Dame Sarah Storey, instructs.

Luckily, most of the 15 young women in the room, trying out for one of three coveted places in the Skoda DSI Cycling Academy, aren’t your average amateurs. They have a year or so of cycling under their belts in local clubs