We started off together, smiling for the cameras at the start line. Me and Victoria Pendleton, pedalling two abreast like old muckers, chatting as we wound through Tatton Park and out on to the country lanes of Cheshire. But five minutes in, something was awry. I looked over at my companion: her legs were turning like a windmill in a hurricane. She's on the wrong sort of bike, I mused. Or maybe she's just not used to having gears, bless her, after all those hours going round and round the velodrome on a fixie. These were thoughts I kept to myself after noticing the branding on her frame: Pendleton, written in a gold cursive script. It was a hybrid the Olympic champion had designed for Halfords.

"Go on without me!" she cried. "I'm on a slow bike!" I hesitated. I couldn't overtake Victoria Pendleton, could I? Could I? It didn't take long to decide. After all, I had a programme tracking the ride on my phone and was keen to get a good time. And so it was that I slipped my chain on to the biggest ring and into a higher gear and left the fastest woman on two wheels for dust. I can't deny it felt good.

A few hours later, it emerges that Pendleton had a good reason for being such a slowcoach. She had a torn quad, an injury she picked up in the local supermarket bending down to her trolley (Pendleton is a veteran of lame maladies: she once got patellar tendonitis running across a car park). Then there was the small matter of her being an ambassador for the ride, an all-women event in the Cycletta series designed to encourage ladies on their bikes.

Overtaking the whole field on a clunky hybrid bike probably wouldn't have been the done thing. Especially as the 32-year-old is on a mission to get more women cycling and believes it is the element of competition that deters women from entering sportives – a fancy word for timed, mass participation bike rides (not races: you need a special licence for that).

"I think women are by nature competitive – secretly, privately within their own selves, on lots of different levels, on the way they look, perform," says Pendleton. "But entering a sporting competition when you've not been brought up in a sporty or competitive environment can be daunting."

Pendleton, whether in the velodrome or on Strictly Come Dancing, always seemed rather steely, too busy trying to be the best and beating herself up to have any fun. Plus she was always crying. But when we meet her eyes are bright and tear-free. She seems happy – far happier than she ever appeared before her retirement last year. So is she? "Definitely. A few people have actually said to me, 'I've never heard you laugh and smile so much.' And I'm like, 'I know! I was under a lot of pressure!'"

Victoria Pendleton ... 'People have said, I've never heard you laugh and smile so much'. Photograph: Howard Barlow

She competed for long enough, she says. Too long? "If it wasn't a home games, I'd have retired in Beijing. But who could resist the home Olympics?" At least she pulled it off. "Yes, I did – just! Thank the lord. I think I probably went four years longer than I really wanted, purely because it was an opportunity that couldn't be ignored."

She insists that she is still good friends with Jess Varnish, who was denied her chance at medal glory when she and Pendleton were disqualified from the team sprint in London. "The thing with Jess is that I feel sad because she worked so hard and the times she produced were phenomenal and the improvements she made in the short period of time could only be done by somebody who was really, really committed. Physically she's far more talented than I am. If you break it down and look at the genetics, she's better suited to it. So I feel really sad that she didn't have the opportunities to win a medal, because it's life changing. It makes me feel quite emotional thinking about it."

Whereas Team GB supersprinter Mark Cavendish didn't talk to Bradley Wiggins for months after Beijing when they failed to get on the podium – arguably because Wiggins was exhausted after winning two golds beforehand – Varnish and Pendleton stayed mates, to the extent that when we meet Pendleton has just been dogsitting Varnish's dachshund.



Reading this on a mobile? See video of Pendleton's Olympic keirin victory here

But while Varnish, 10 years Pendleton's junior, has a whole career ahead of her, Pendleton is revelling in a life where she can saddle up without pressure. "I'm definitely capable of just enjoying riding my bike these days." When she decided to go for a spin after the London Olympics she discovered her Team GB bosses had sold the swanky Pinarello she had trained on. Luckily, Chris Boardman, another Olympian, came to the rescue, gifting her a fast road bike from his Halfords range (her own brand bikes are more for pootling).

For her first post-retirement ride she went for a spin with Ross Edgar, the top track rider who was preparing to switch to the road. "We did about three hours and I really enjoyed it, just cruising around. It was a nice day, the sun was out, we stopped for a coffee. I was thinking, 'I could turn round right now. I could go home. I could take a shortcut. I could have two pieces of cake. It doesn't matter.' It was a revelation, it really was, and it brought some enjoyment back to what I was doing that maybe I had lost through everything that I've had to cycle with over the past 10 years of my life. It was really liberating. It was more like riding my bike in my childhood."

Pendleton always did a lot of her training on the road, and says she had a hairy experience more or less every time she ventured out. "It used to get me down. I used to work out on average how many times people came past me and put me in a dangerous situation. It got to the point where if I went out for one hour there would be one person who would do something a little bit stupid, like overtake and turn left immediately, or overtake at 50mph or 60mph and give me like four inches room.

"It used to make me quite upset, thinking, 'Do people not care about my safety?' I used to think about getting a luminous bike shirt made up which said: FLESH AND BONES. Or some gruesome image, like on a cigarette packet. Do people not realise that if they knock me off it's not just a slight inconvenience and I might have a broken leg, but you could have potentially ruined my whole career and everything I've trained for since I was a child, just for the sake of getting somewhere slightly quicker? A car is a killing machine. It's like waving a loaded gun. People don't realise how dangerous they are."

Pendleton and Jess Varnish after being disqualified from the team sprint at the Olympics. Photograph: Cathal Mcnaughton/Reuters

She hates seeing cyclists run red lights, she says. "I get really annoyed because I think if you do something that irritates a driver, that driver might take it out on the next cyclist, who is abiding by the rules."

Apart from her good cheer, the other thing I can't help noticing about Pendleton is how slim she is. Just as Kate Moss is often said to be too small for modelling, on paper Pendleton is not nearly tall or broad enough to be a track sprinter. But all through her professional career she worked tirelessly to bulk up, telling a woman's magazine before the London Olympics that she was chuffed when her physio remarked that her thighs were looking big. So does she miss her Olympic body?

"Yes. It's actually been a big thing. I haven't got to grips with it yet. It makes me feel quite sad. I look in the mirror and think, that's not the body I've been used to looking at for the past 10 years. I've lost a stone in muscle. There's no way you can maintain that muscle without hitting the gym 100% full on. But it's just gone because I haven't been weight training. I do miss the way I used to look … I don't feel like I recognise myself when I look in the mirror. I'm like, 'They're not my legs!' I would genuinely like to be bigger."

But she is enjoying finally being able to eat what she wants, which currently is a vegetarian diet. "Eating vegetarian in the past would have been a really bad choice as an athlete. Impossible. Just being able to get the amount of protein in was a mission. You couldn't be picky. I feel quite liberated by the fact that I can now quite recklessly choose vegetarian food."

Pendleton, it is clear, leads quite a closeted life. When I ask her what she thought of the blistering retirement speech given by her fellow gold medal winner, road cyclist Nicole Cooke – who blasted the lack of support for women's cycling and lamented the fact that drug cheat Tyler Hamilton would earn more from his doping confessional than she earned in a whole career of racing clean – Pendleton says she hadn't heard it. This could be an avoidance tactic but Pendleton's ignorance felt genuine.

She promises to go away and read Cooke's speech and says she could never race on the road professionally. "I really feel for the women cyclists, you know. I wouldn't be a woman road cyclist. I wouldn't do it because it's almost insulting, the amount of support they get. To have to watch your male counterparts lead that kind of life and then you live on a shoestring with no support – not mocked exactly, but it feels like that because you get so little in comparison. I personally couldn't do it. If I was talented on the road I would find it a really hard decision to make. I couldn't put up with it."

Pendleton with her Olympic gold medal after winning the women's keirin final. Photograph: Ian Langsdon/EPA

By the time she retired in August 2012, there was gender parity in the velodrome, with an equal number of events for men and women. "There is no reason why that ever should not have been the case," she says. "It should be across all sports. You put the same training in. People say, oh women don't race as far – but they are still training fucking six hours a day, putting 100% in."

Though clearly enjoying her retirement, Pendleton is hardly putting her feet up. She's planning her wedding to Team GB coach Scott Gardner, who was forced to quit the cycling squad once their relationship became public. Gardner has recently been appointed head coach for the GB kayak and canoe team and so they are soon to move south to be near Eton Dorney in Buckinghamshire, where the watersport teams train. She also says she wants to design her own cyclewear range – "Because I've been wearing men's extra small my whole life and I think there's something slightly wrong about that" – and would like to get involved with talent spotting within cycling. Getting more girls on bikes is another goal.

And she wants to get her muscles back, of course. "A bit more leg muscle, a bit more arm muscle, back muscle. It's something I really do aim to do, to get a bit more toned, when I have time."

• The next all-women Cycletta ride is in Bedfordshire on 30 June