It’s 1pm on a Wednesday afternoon, and Helen Glover has just wrapped up training for the day. This is the one half-day in her working week, which runs from half-six on Monday morning till half-two on Saturday afternoon, but she still needs to pick up the kids at three, just as she does every school day, so these next couple of hours are the only ones she has to herself, or to do much of anything else. In the circumstances, I feel a little guilty about using them for this interview when she would, presumably, rather be having a quiet cup of tea or catching up on her sleep. Glover, 37, tells me she’s used to it.

It has been a year since Glover announced she was coming out of retirement, again, to compete at the Paris Olympics this summer. It’s all a little different this time. In 2012, 2016 and 2020 she was competing in the women’s pair, but in 2024 she will be the senior member of the women’s four. She says it has been refreshing working with a new crew and a new coach. They’re coming along well, and won silver at the European championships last May, and bronze at the world championships in September, although Glover admits they will need to “step-up again” if they’re going to win a medal at the Olympics this summer.

She has given a fair few of these Wednesday afternoon interviews in these last few months. This one is on behalf of Aldi, which is an official partner of Team GB & ParalympicsGB. Just reading the clippings is exhausting. Glover is out the house at 6.30am, does two hours and 15 minutes training on the water, runs through video analysis, does another hour on the water or on the bike, then drives straight to the gym and does another hour of weight training, then does the school run and takes the three kids off “to swimming or tennis or gymnastics or the library or the park or play date” before they all eat dinner together.

Glover is a formidable athlete, and a formidable advocate for working mothers. “A big part of the decisions to come back was in thinking: ‘what can I actively do to help the future for my little girl and other little girls out there?’” she says, “and also other women who have got young families and want to feel empowered?” Her achievement in Tokyo, when she became the first mother to make the GB rowing team, and qualified for an Olympic final only 18 months after giving birth to twins, was extraordinary, although she wishes it was anything but. “When I think of the women on the team at the moment, most of them probably won’t want to have a family and then go back to rowing, but every single one of them should have that option.”

A lot has been written, and said, about what a grand job she is doing juggling her career with bringing up her kids. In the headlines she sometimes comes off as the Sheryl Sandberg of sport. I imagine all the coverage of her mothering must get frustrating, and sometimes, Glover admits, she does wish people would ask her about her athletic success. “Mainly though, I will always feel proud when I read those headlines, because they wouldn’t be there if things were different. There are so many areas of society that still need work, and sport is a big one of them.”

That change Glover is pushing for, though, isn’t going to happen unless we are able to talk honestly about the challenges it involves. I have three kids myself, two of them twins, and to be honest all the talk about how much you can get done if you’re up at 6am and have a “can-do” attitude gets a little grating.

“I finish by three every single day,” Glover tells me at one point, “because it is a non-negotiable that I will always do school pick-up.” There is a privilege in that. And there is a privilege, too, in being able to have your mother come up from Cornwall to look after the children for a few days because you and your husband are both away working, and in having babysitters on hand who are willing to step in for an hour or two on the weekends when something’s come up at late notice. These aren’t options available to most working parents.

It’s a relief to find that Glover gets this. She hasn’t asked to be put on a pedestal, and doesn’t much enjoy being on one now she is. “I’ve always found it a little difficult to accept the superhero-status of Olympians,” she says, “you know, when people write about you like you’re a different breed. And all that just goes to another level if you’re also a mum. That’s the actual opposite of what I want to be portraying here. This is not about me saying: ‘look at what I’m doing,’ it’s about me doing it and saying: ‘It’s so freaking hard and I’m making so many mistakes.’ I’m not claiming it’s easy.”

And here, at last, I feel a measure of recognition. I imagine every working parent does. Because the truth is there is no way to do this, or anything half like it, without making a lot of compromises. For Glover, they have been around her athletic routine. Between 2012 and 2016, when she won back-to-back Olympic gold medals, she was renowned as one of the biggest perfectionists on the team. She once described herself as “borderline obsessive”. She had a regimen that included taking 16,000 strokes for every one she would have to make in an Olympic final. There were, she said then, “no shortcuts”.

Now, Glover admits, there are days that are nothing but. The truth is you can’t do everything without giving up something. “I’ve had to become extremely accepting of imperfection,” she says. “I would rather muddle through a day doing the best I can than not try to do something because it just won’t work. So yeah, most of our days, there’ll be something – someone will have a temperature and need to be picked up from school or someone will be ill in my boat, so I’ll have to change my training programme. And I just think that my attitude to it now is super-chilled. A decade ago it was very different. My attitude then was that everything was so important, everything mattered, all the small details.”

She has, for instance, had to give up on recovery sessions. She just doesn’t have time. “But if the last few years taught me anything, it is that the body is amazing. So this has become my new normal. I am coping. But if somebody’s perspective is that I’m doing it all, well, I’m not training the same way I was when I was in my 20s, and I’m definitely not getting the same sleep as I was, either. So I’m doing it, but I’m doing it differently. There has to be flex. But there’s something really exciting about that, because when you flex, you discover things that you never thought possible.”

And it’s working for her. Glover has been setting record times. “I’m getting scores and I’m hitting targets that are lifetime bests, that I just would not have believed were possible under these conditions. But I think some of it is because of this mindset shift, and the way it has taken the pressure off me. I never would have believed these things would be conducive to success. You shouldn’t limit yourself, shouldn’t believe you can’t do it, but to be open to the possibility of doing something imperfectly.”

In Paris this summer, she will try, one more time, and, win or lose, the trying will be enough.