IT’S safe to say that Karen Darke is not afraid of a challenge.

Throughout course of her life, she has taken on some quite remarkable adventures, from hand-biking across the Himalayas to climbing El Capitan to ski traversing across Greenland for a month. Things that are certainly not for the faint-hearted.

It is her past successes that make her newest challenge somewhat unsurprising. Darke is a Paralympic champion in hand-biking, winning gold at Rio 2016 in the road time-trial H1-3 to add to her silver from London 2012.

She is now on the verge of competing in her first Commonwealth Games, but with hand-biking not included in the sports programme in Gold Coast, she was forced to switch sports entirely if she wanted to make her first Commonwealth Games appearance.

And this is exactly what she did. In the aftermath of the Rio Olympics, Darke made the decision to switch to para-triathlon. For many, having only a year-and-a-half to learn a new sport would be far too short a time-scale but for Darke, few things seems impossible. She had previously dabbled in the discipline but had never focussed on it entirely but that did not deter her.

“I’ve found the transition has been quite hard actually,” she said.

“Cycling is my real love and that’s what I’ve spent so long doing. But over the last 18 months, since Rio, I’ve been having a real go at triathlon with the aim of getting to the Commonwealth Games.

I’m not a big fan of swimming so that’s been pretty hard. And what I’ve found tough is doing the three events in training and how you fit it all in.

“So it’s been a challenge to work out to do it all and not get over-tired by doing too much because that’s the real danger.”

Darke’s journey to this point has been quite remarkable. As a teenager, she found she had a real passion for climbing and by the time she reached her early twenties, she had climbed Mont Blanc and the Matterhorn, as well as winning the Swiss Mountain Marathon.

However, in 1993, Darke’s life changed forever when a climbing accident, which broke her skull, neck, ribs and arms, left her paralysed from the chest down. The accident left her unconscious and when she woke up three days later, she could remember nothing of what had happened.

Being told she would be unable to walk again was, she says, almost impossible to get her head around but it was watching the London Marathon on the television that sparked an idea. She could, she thought, do that herself and from that point, she was on the path to becoming a hand-bike racer.

But her career as an elite racer did not dull her spirit of adventure and she undertook a number of adventures in addition to the Himalayas and El Capitan expeditions including hand-biking across Japan and kayaking the Alaska coastline.

Darke was born in Yorkshire but has spent her entire adult life in Scotland, primarily in the north-east. She is now 46-years-old and is just as eager to defy the odds as she has always been.

Despite being in the midst of triathlon training, late last year she embarked on a ride from Canada to Mexico - a journey of 2,000 miles which she completed using only her arms. “It was crazy and amazing,” she said.

“It’s a very long way and it was just relentless – there just weren’t any breaks so that was tough. So it was hard but it was a great experience.”

Her assault on the Commonwealth Games is now only a few weeks away and despite suffering a number of setbacks in the course of the last year, she cannot wait to get to Gold Coast and get racing. “I’m feeling excited,” she said.

“For a lot of the last year I’ve been feeling a bit of a sense of dread because I couldn’t train quite how I wanted to and so I was thinking oh no, this is a disaster!!

“I had the flu and I had colds which would stop me doing things but that all seems to have gone now and so I’m excited to see what happens.

“When you get to the last few weeks before a major competition like this, you just have to trust in your training.

“I’m training to the best of my ability and what’s also important is getting the balance right so it’s about getting enough rest too.

“In the final stretch, it’s about keeping calm and maybe making those last few final tweaks but not getting over-tired or injured.”

And while learning a new sport has not always been easy, she admits she has enjoyed the process. “I am enjoying it,” she said.

“Especially in the past few months, I’ve seen some real improvements so that’s made it a lot more enjoyable.

“I’m paralysed from quite high up so that means that it’s really hard on my body. It’s not so much the training that’s the most tiring thing, it’s the getting changed and getting into different positions that’s tiring.

“I do like a challenge though. After London and after Rio as well, I did feel like I wanted to do something to help me avoid that post-Olympic depression.

“So that’s been something that’s been good for me and I’m just made up that I’ve qualified for Gold Coast.”

Darke is nothing if not ambitious and while she admits to being somewhat unsure quite what to expect in terms of her performance, she is harbouring ambitions of grabbing a spot on the podium.

“I’m excited about competing for Team Scotland and I’m just hoping that I can bring a medal for Scotland back,” she said.

“This is a new sport for me and so I’m not entirely sure what’s going to happen but I’m hoping to get a spot on the podium.

“I’m feeling good so I’m going to go over there and hope for the best.

“It’s nice going into the Commonwealth Games because the thing when you’ve been performing at a high level is that there’s expectations there.

“You put greater pressure on yourself and the higher your expectations, the tougher it gets mentally.

“But this time, it feels quite freeing because I’m going into is with more of an attitude of I’ll just see what I can do. It’s a good challenge to be taking on and so I’m definitely feeling excited to see what happens.”