me

I know I'm a good professional, I know that no one's harder on me than myself and that's never going to change, under any circumstances.

I've reached the point where I hardly care whether I live or die. The world will keep on turning without me, and I can't do anything to change events anyway.

When the seasons shift, even the subtle beginning, the scent of a promised change, I feel something stir inside me. Hopefulness? Gratitude? Openness? Whatever it is, it's welcome.

As a leader, the first person I need to lead is me. The first person that I should try to change is me.

Don't change on me. Don't extort me unless you intend to do it forever.

Almost 70 per cent of your fitness battle is won the day you realise what your body needs and when. I've made my own diets, and I decide for myself what works for me.

Obviously, when you're doing fitness work at a club all week and every week, it's all about specific drills for what you need to do on the pitch. So I'd be doing a different drill to the centre-midfielders. It's all specifically tailored for me. For example, my drills are high speed. It's all about trying to break the line with a sharp sprint.

My husband and I own a CrossFit Gym. Crossfit is perfect for me because it's always competitive, all the workouts are in a class environment, and it's different every day. It's a constantly varied functional fitness workout done with intensity.

Fitness will be a major factor in the first race and I think that will play into the hands of drivers who have been racing recently, rather than people like me who haven't raced properly for a decade. I'am not one of the favourites to start with.

Kids are starting at such a low base rate in terms of fitness that it's taking them years to catch up to where people like me started from. Every little bit is making it more difficult for kids to succeed on a world stage.

Fitness is defined differently by everyone, but for me, the most important thing is being healthy. As tennis players, what we do is not the healthiest thing. We almost abuse our bodies.

For a good workout, I go to At One Fitness in North Hollywood, where my trainer, Jon Allsop, puts me through it all. I like it because it's a small gym and I've known the people for a long time. Jon will have me do cross-training where I'll lift weights, jump rope, throw around a medicine ball and I never get to stop.

The bowlers I respected or feared or rated were not the ones who gave me lip or stared at me or abused me. More the ones who, at any stage of the game, when had they had the ball in hand, they were going to be at me, and they were going to have the skill and the fitness and the ability to be aggressive.

Let's face it: fitness is boring. But it's critical to be extremely dedicated to whatever you decide to take up to achieve a desired result. There's no way you are going to get there without dedication, which is the key for me.

The fitness builds the foundation for me as an actor to have clarity. Fitness has always been the base of where I start off as a performer.

For a long time I thought I could deal with my anger and hostility on my own. But I couldn't. I denied that it had affected me, and yet I was so frantic on the inside with other people: I needed to be constantly reassured.

I can jog, but I can't run. That's hard for me. I like the fact that I can jog for fitness, but to me there's a huge difference between jogging and running.

What's important is to get into shape and then not to have to worry about it. I don't want to get on stage and not being able to do something. Not being physically fit doesn't work for me.