As a Cambridge student, admitting that you’ve failed at something is like volunteering to have one of your teeth extracted just for kicks. But the first step to rehabilitation is acceptance, so here we go: my name is Roxana and I used to row.

There, I said it. In my first two years at Cambridge I rowed for my college and absolutely sucked at it. I used to be one of those Ripley’s Believe It or Not rowers, one that never initiated or even joined in boatie banter. Not because I didn’t love it, but because whenever we got to the unavoidable erg scores conversation I had to run away: mine were about ten times worse than everyone else’s.

It comes to no surprise that I was never in the best crews. Had I been the coach, I wouldn’t have let myself anywhere near a boat. So, at the end of last year, I finally decided to make my life as well as everyone else’s easier and quit once and for all. But I couldn’t quite cut myself off completely, so I took on coxing instead.

Now, for those of you who don’t know, a cox is the person sitting at the front of a boat who steers, is in charge of the crew and motivates them during races. All fairly straightforward. But I have one teeny-tiny thing that makes things slightly more complicated. I’m dyspraxic, which means that my hand-eye coordination is about as good as Miley Cyrus’ singing. So in my first outing I managed to almost kill the eight people in my boat by crashing them into other boats, trees, bushes, banks, dogs, swans, you name it. If it was within reach, we probably hit it.

While adrenaline definitely didn’t lack in my boat, I gradually got better. That’s when coxing became a different experience. Here I was telling eight men what to do and shouting at them mercilessly if they did something wrong, which is pretty much every woman’s dream. The power was incredible – I even (almost) went to Ann Summers to look at leather whips.

What made things even better was the first race. When the start whistle went off I turned into a different person. I could still remember the awful pain from the races I had rowed in. I knew exactly what these guys were going through, and how much they wanted to stop rowing and get away from it. So I went crazy. I started screaming like never before, telling them it didn’t hurt enough, making them squeeze every bit of power from their aching bodies. It got so intense that I bit my cheek and started bleeding, splurting blood everywhere without noticing. They responded like I never knew they could, and in the end we won the race.

I have now finally come to terms with my failed rowing career. The fact that it allows me to understand my crew as their cox and use that for their benefit has helped me accept it. If that’s as close as I’ll ever get to being good at a sport, it’s enough for me.