A year ago I was puffing away in the shallow end of my local pool trying to find my balance and figure out how to not get water up my nose. Swimming 25 meters of front crawl was still a few weeks away and I watched the proper swimmers with envy thinking I’d never get to be like them.

Fast forward a year to the weekend just gone and I had become captain of a swim team in a surprising turn of events that would have my 15-year-old self wetting themselves with laughter. It may have been a self-elected position but captain is captain, even when it isn’t decided by a democratic process. In truth my enthusiasm for the captaincy was down to the fact I thought I might get a captain’s armband. Preferably two of the inflatable variety. This wasn’t the case.

Swim Britain events take place in pools all over the country – but there’s only one open water race. So me, Katie, Jen and Cathy – together as Team Rainbow – headed to Blenheim Palace to trash talk David Walliams and Keri-Anne Payne and go head-to-head with 100 other teams.

The race was your standard four-person relay with each team member swimming four 250 meter legs. Cathy was up first – a position denoted by her purple swim cap. After she’d dived in and swum out to a marker buoy and back she handed over to me. There’s no baton in a swim relay – my suggestion of a lilo-shaped inflatable baton that you could straddle having not been taken up by the event organisers. Instead Cathy and I exchanged a fist-bump and then I was off, into the lake.

My last couple of open water swims have been 1500 meters long, so I dived into the lake and swam as fast as my arms would go and for the first time ever I found myself overtaking another swimmer. After about 100 meters this had proved to be a mistake. I was out of breath and had to do the return swim still. After a rest behind a couple of slower swimmers turning the buoy and a lung-full of lakewater later, I was on my way back to the bank to hand over to Jen.

Team Rainbow had the best relay changeovers on show – I handed over to Jen with a chestbump and she handed over to Katie, our very own Usain Bolt on the anchor leg, with a hip-to-hip bump. There were a couple of handover mishaps – namely when we were too busy stuffing cereal bars into our faces to notice that the swimmer before had finished and was waiting on the bank. But other than that – Team GB, come see us and we’ll show you how relays are supposed to go.

We finished our 4km swim in 1:29:34 – putting us halfway up the leader board and earning us some rather spectacular bling. And if there’d have been a prize for which team could work the post-race space blankets the best, we’d have taken top spot on the podium.

Disclosure: Swim Britain gave us a free race entry. We still very much recommend it though. It was fun.