Joanna Rowsell column: I'm mentally and physically ready for World Championships

This time tomorrow the UCI Track Cycling World Championships in Paris will be under way and, with a bit of luck, we will have booked our place in the women’s team pursuit gold-medal final.

It’s an event we have dominated for the past few years and we certainly want to keep that going, but it won’t be easy because our rivals are getting better with every race.

It is one of two world titles I will be defending over the next three days, the other being the individual pursuit, but I don’t actually look at it like that.

Defending suggests you are there to be shot at and puts you under pressure. I prefer to think that I have two world titles to gain.

Rowsell, right, was part of Britain's victorious team pursuit quartet at last year's worlds

Qualifying for the team pursuit takes place on Wednesday afternoon and the finals follow on Thursday evening, and then I’ve got both qualifying and the finals – should I get that far – in the individual pursuit on Friday, so it’s going to be an intense and exhausting time. I can’t wait to get started, though.

I feel great going into the championships thanks to a really good winter of training. After the Track Cycling World Cup in London in December, we went to Tenerife for two weeks for an altitude training camp, which was a first for us, and basically spent every day riding up and down Mount Teide, which is over 3,700m high at the summit.

We would climb uphill for three hours and then descend back down to our hotel, which had hardly any internet access and virtually no phone signal, so it was a very focused camp, albeit something of an experiment.

Rowsell says an altitude training camp has been beneficial

But I think it paid off because when we went to Mallorca for another camp in January, I was beating all my personal bests on the climbs and even exceeding my power outputs from before the London 2012 Olympics, which was pretty eye-opening. Obviously, a 4km team pursuit or a 3km individual pursuit are very different to climbing Teide, but the omens look good.

As well as being physically strong, I also feel mentally fresh. After the European Championships in October, I skipped the UCI Track Cycling World Cup in Mexico and instead went out to Mallorca to train on my own for a couple of weeks and that was just what I needed. It recharged my batteries and, when I returned to competition, I was at a much higher level.

Space can be good sometimes because team pursuit training can be very intense, but at the same time I didn’t want to be away too long because competition for places is so fierce that taking breaks can be a dangerous game to play.

Rowsell took a break from competition at the end of last season

That said, keeping our places in the team is not the only things on our minds these days, because for some of us, weddings are now right up there, too.

I became engaged last autumn, then Laura Trott became engaged to Jason Kenny around Christmas and Vicky Williamson, who is one of the sprinters, also got engaged, so there are three of us planning weddings.

There are wedding magazines all over the hotel now and it is a great way to distract yourself from the worries of racing. Instead of lying in bed at night stressing about how I am going to perform, I can just say to myself, ‘Nevermind that, what wedding cake am I going to have?’

Don’t get me wrong, though, these World Championships mean everything to me and when I take to the track over the next three days, gold medals will be the only thing on my mind.