Those handbag shaped weights are, as you can see, bloody heavy and are shaped as such because they need to be easy to grip to avoid accidental demolition of the building, rather than to give them a feminine touch.

I have been timid on the running front over the last month, only going for 5-6km jogs when the weather hasn’t put me off (read: extremely seldom occurrence). I’d like to blame it on my throat, but really it’s more that I hate the cold and last year’s winter spent training for a marathon brings back memories of a phase spent being unnecessarily spartan, as opposed to fond memories of me running with the romantic backdrop of snowy hills. It was, in part, sheer hell. Especially when the temperatures dropped to -18 Celcius and my belly and arse literally tried to freeze on me. After each run they had gone bright red either in an attempt to actually solidify or through desperately resisting turning my body into a mobile igloo. I don’t care what the intentions my body had in mind, at the end of it all I was left with a belly and arse that had both encountered a near death experience.

So, the kettle bells have made a reappearance, as I mentioned a few weeks ago. They had been dormant throughout the 2-3 months I banned myself from intentionally raising my heart rate, but now they are in full swing again (whey!).

As B and I got back into using them, we realised that this is probably going to prove a far more effective way of conditioning the leg muscles and cardiovascular side of things than running ever was. How do we know this?

First of all, the first time I picked them up again, I walked like a penguin for three whole days afterwards. Healthy muscle pain is always a good sign in my books.

Secondly, when KB-ing, I drip with sweat like a pig in a rainforest and half to pause to catch my breath as I do when I sprint.

They offer plenty of other benefits, such as being easy to mix up to eliminate boredom, being easy to store at home, thus negating the “need” for a gym membership, being so tough that you only need to work hard for 30 minutes to start seeing stars. They are also more fun than just doing body weight exercises or doing youtube led yoga – I tried this and found myself curled up under the mat napping. Ok, I exaggerate, but youtube yoga is not stimulating, at least at real yoga you can watch other people shake or pluck their leggings out from between their bum cheeks.

Anyway, back to the kettle bells. For anyone who is curious as to what I do with them, here is the workout I did last night. If people show an interest (genuine or not, I’m not picky), I might even post pictures next time to facilitate explanation. If people aren’t terrified by the prospect of seeing my wobbly belly, I will even post that before and after experiment I promised yet failed to deliver.

24 minute beginner kettle bell training that will have you hobbling for days

Set an interval timer for alternating rounds of 1 min (activity) and 30 seconds (recover) for a total of 16 or 24 sets, depending on how fit and strong you are. I did this with both the 8kg and 12kg depending on the exercise.

For one minute do continuous reps of the following with a 30 second break in between:

1. Clean squat press (right) 8kg

2. Same on the left 8kg

3. Kettle bell lunge (right) Although, unlike in the video, I do it with my right hand holding the KB straight above my head, arm fully extended). 8kg

4. Same on left 8kg

5. Kettle bell row (from 45 seconds into the video) 12kg

6. Hip thrusts (4 mins into video)

7. Kettle bell swing 12kg

8. Sitting with your legs straight ahead and holding the kettle bell next to your hip on one side. Move the kettle bell from that position to the same on the other side and keep moving it back and forth without it touching the ground.

All of the above either once or twice more.

I like to make a note of how many reps I managed of each exercise to see how I improve.

I’ll try to post more updates on the kettle bell front as the running, although not totally retired, is going through a patchy phase.

Today will be the third time I attend Jeff’s running sessions and my hope that the weather will cooperate is equal in sincerity to my hope that I will survive the training. I was away for a few days so haven’t been able to squeeze any running in all week, it’s going to be a shock to the system! Just what I need to get my arse back in gear – the Alpine half is only 6 weeks away!

Some people have been curious as to what goes on at these running sessions, so I thought I’d write about what we did last Wednesday.

We currently meet at the Saalsporthalle, near Sihl City – it seems in the winter months the meeting spot is the Sihlhölzli track. Meeting hear gives us easy access to the hills and some flat routes and it happens to be one of the areas I usually run in independently. The difference is that I don’t usually drive a car full of weights to the area, I just jog nonchalantly through the fields.

On this particular occasion we started with a 600m easy warm up.

Then Jeff broke the terrifying news.

For 20 minutes we were to…

Run around the 300m triangle as fast as possible

Swing a kettlebell of our choice

Pick one of the following

That’s one cycle. I managed six.

As if that wasn’t exhausting enough.

We then ended with a race between two teams.

One person pulled one of the sleds towards them. Then a bungee rope was attached to the weight and another team member strapped themselves in and did 5 bear crawls out and back. Repeat, repeat, repeat.

Now, if that doesn’t sound quite gruelling to you, then quite frankly I don’t want to know what you do to break a sweat. If it sounds like fun, I assure you it is. Of course, you have to bear in mind I’m a bit of a self-flagellator, but I reckon this is a fun challenge, or at the very least a manageable challenge, even for the not so Masochistic runners out there.

Yesterday was a perfect afternoon for a friendly jog with a 400m altitude climb

As promised, I am delivering a non-food related blog post. This time I’m going to talk about running.

On Wednesday I joined the first session of the 6th series of Jeff Grant’s Wednesday Night Running Sessions and I loved it. I’ll admit that although my friend had been recommending it to me for a while, I was skeptical. I associated running sessions with nothing more than being told what to do and having to churn out monotonous drills. On Wednesday we did have to do running drills, but the energy of the people there sent the notion of monotony straight out the window.

After warming up we started by doing a benchmark run of around 1.5km with a 300m relatively steep uphill stretch at the end. This took me 07:29. The aim is, of course, to improve over the next 6 weeks and lower my time. To make sure we achieve this, Jeff set out an interval workout for us to do. For ten minutes we had to run between cones set at varying distances and at different gradients. Did I understand that this exercise was going to help me run faster? Absolutely. Am I disciplined enough to do this sort of training on a weekly basis all by myself? Absolutely not. These drills are definitely the brussel sprouts of a runner’s training – at least for me they are.

What I really loved the most was that we were a big group of almost 20 people ranging from relatively new runners to supremely fast-legged people. No matter what one’s level was, everyone was supportive and we cheered each other on during the particularly tough bits. Thanks to everyone’s encouragement I realised I am actually pretty strong on the uphill sections and that I am on track for beating last year’s mountain race time. You don’t necessarily get to experience these little moments of personal glory when running alone.

All in all, it was a really positive experience and I think it will contribute to my newly found enjoyment of running with other people.

I used to prefer running alone because I liked to dictate my own speed. Now I’m coming to understand that occasionally running with people who push me to my limits is a fantastic training opportunity. The same goes for when I need to slow down to accommodate someone else since I struggle to keep to slower paces.

I also used to favour my iPod as my running buddy but about half a year ago I ditched it for listening to sounds that could be delivered to my ears without the need for earbuds. I find I’m a much more relaxed runner now. The iPod has been relegated to race only companion for now.

It’s actually crazy to think how much my running has improved and evolved since I joined the triathlon club at school at the age of 16. I’ll write an evolution post another time, but for now just picture me at 16 barely able to comfortably run 3km. Now take a look at the picture below and measure the width of my grin.

This was taken just after I finished the Alpine Half Marathon last year. Despite the fact that it was 23km instead of 21km, which I hadn’t known in advance, I was beaming after crossing the finish line. People wonder why I “torture” myself by running uphill for hours at a time or churning out 20km plus training runs in preparation for distance races, but I have yet to think of an answer that fully evokes the feeling one gets at the end of such a grueling ordeal. I’m just going to say that you’re going to have to trust that my smile is genuine.

I didn’t mention this in my actual marathon post, but one of the negative outcomes of heaving my body over the finish line in Paris was (well, is) that I injured my foot in the process. The injury was kick-started by my Darwin Award worthy slip up that took place about two weeks before the marathon.

Basically, I had just started jogging along the river, just around the corner from my office, when my shorts threatened to cosy up to my ankles. All I attempted to do was to stop and tighten them.A pretty straight-forward procedure for any normal human being, in theory. What happened in reality was that as soon as I stopped I twisted my ankle. That’s right, I injured myself whilst attempting to remain static…to add insult to injury, literally, I shot said foot out to the side to try to regain my balance and ended up whacking the edge of the pavement with my ankle bone. I was too embarrassed to stop and take in the experience so I scuttled off towards the track to run off the humiliation.

What I hadn’t noticed until I got to the track is that twisting my ankle had actually irritated a nerve…in my arse. Determined to get my training session under my belt, I ignored the discomfort in my right arse cheek and powered through. Rookie error.

Despite my idiocy, to my relief, come marathon day my ankle felt as springy as ever and my arse was back to its usual numb self so I just shoved them to the back of my mind. Not to mention I was preoccupied with thoughts of possible dehydration and cardiac arrest. I personally think B should love preparing for a marathon with a hypochondriac seeing as it would make him feel healthy and able-bodied by comparison. Instead it annoys the crap out of him. Ho hum.

The good news is that post marathon the chest pain that had triggered heart disease hypochondria stopped plaguing me, proving once and for all that it was in fact brought on by paranoia (and proving B right, yet again). My foot implosion worries decided this was its cue to take centre stage. My boyfriend is thrilled by the prospect of having to reassure me all over again that my body is that of a healthy 24 year old, not a decrepit 84 year old in need of the world’s first ever whole body transplant.

To be honest, it’s not that painful anymore. In fact, it goes away long enough to give me the false impression I’m ready to run again only to strip me of my naivety as soon as I attempt to run a respectable distance.

Most people would probably relish the opportunity to regress to couch potato status immediately after something as strenuous as a full marathon, but the thing is, aside from this foot malarkey, I actually found I recovered in no time at all. Emma, my sports massage therapist (a post on her scarily powerful hands to come), seemed to find more knots to loosen before the race than after. This means that if it weren’t for the rebel tendon, I’d be on track for training to beat my Davos half marathon time from last year. Instead, I envision a scenario in which I will represent Sisyphus while my arse represents the massive boulder…

I haven’t given up yet though. Instead of running as frequently as I used to, I’ve really committed myself to using the kettlebell I went to the trouble of tracking down here in Zurich.

I’d been meaning to make use of it for a while now, but laziness and the delusion that marathon training was enough to get me in shape stopped me. Now that my foot won’t let me engage in forward motion I thought I might as well give jiggling about on the spot holding an 8kg blob of iron a go.

This is the routine I’ve been starting out with:

You’ll probably look at it and think, “pah, 10 minutes is nothing”, because I did when I first picked up my kettlebell. After my first attempt at following this video I was sweatier than I have ever been in my life and I’ve lived through Japanese summers, so that’s saying something!

I’m aiming to build up to my 12kg kettlebell investment within the next 3-4 weeks and to do that I’m using Marianne from MyoMyTV to talk me into it with her lovely Irish accent. The fact that she has buns of steel doesn’t do any harm on the inspiration front! She’s also a hell of a lot less nasal and easier on the eye than the dude in the video above aswell.

On a tenuously related note, I just got back into bouldering again yesterday and I could tell that my kettlebell cleans and press ups have helped to considerably minimise the level of strength loss frustration I usually face after a long break.

I know you’re curious now. You want to see if 10 minutes of lugging a mini canon ball around could really make you sweat like a WWE wrestler. I will prove it. I’ve set myself a 6-week challenge. I’ll be doing some sort of kettlebell training 3-4 times a week over the next 6 weeks and I’ll post a before and after picture. I’ve taken the before picture, but I don’t have the guts to post it until I can line it up against a picture of me looking smug in an after photo.

image of wolf from here

Despite the deep freeze we experienced in Zurich during the peak of our training and the fact that I sustained an injury worthy of a Darwin Award, B and I crossed the finish line of the Paris Marathon with all limbs intact.

We hopped on the TGV on Friday morning and had the daunting realisation that the 4 hour journey to Paris would be a simulation of the amount of time we’d be running on Sunday. I decided to push that thought deeper into my subconscious by sleeping for the majority of the trip. B is not impressed by the fact that public transport knocks me out practically instantaneously, meaning he might as well bring a back up girlfriend to keep him company on long trips.

Our accommodation was pre-booked via Airbnb so we just had to make our way to the flat to meet the tenant’s boyfriend so that he could give us the key. If you haven’t already heard of Airbnb, it’s basically Premium Couchsurfing, which means you pay, but it also means you have the option of renting out an entire flat, thus ensuring you’ll be able to walk around in your underwear without any adverse consequences.

Our place was on Rue du Soleil, which was a bit far out, but true the street’s name, it was wonderfully bright:

I would definitely recommend Airbnb to anyone simply needing a place to rest one’s head after a busy day of sightseeing – we only paid 30 Euros per night each. Kaching.

The weather was typical April weather, which meant Yuko, a dear friend of mine who recently moved to Paris, was able to take eerily bright yet dark pictures:

Since we weren’t really meant to stay on our feet too long during the days leading up to the marathon, we opted out of touring the sights and focused on carb loading. This was considerably cheaper to do in Paris than in Zurich – the crepe below cost me 5 Euros and it could have kept me going for three days.

There would have been plenty more pre-marathon pictures had B and I not needed to spend half a day at the running expo picking up our bibs and resisting the temptation to buy a whole new running wardrobe.

On the day of the race we woke up at 5:00 to have a carb-rich breakfast of bread and Nutella. I was relieved to find the Nutella prompted a successful trip to the loo, reassuring me that a Paula Radcliffe scenario would no longer be likely.

We headed to Champs-Élysées at around 7:00 and Yuko, the saint that she is, met us on the way so that she could take our rucksack and give us some last minute encouragement to calm the nerves. Since she’s a skilled photographer, she also provided all the visual evidence that we did in fact run the race.

As the tension mounted we took refuge in a McDonalds where I managed to use the loo three times in the span of 30 minutes. This didn’t stop me from needing to pee behind a tree at the 10km mark, but I was lucky that for once in my life the ladies’ queue was infinitely shorter than the men’s so I was able to carry out my little ritual with ease.

I was worried my bum bag wasn’t going to be tight enough so I employed the help of my strapping boyfriend and ensured the bag cut off the circulation to my legs. To my dismay, this did not yield an anaesthetic side-effect as hoped.

I then proceeded to rummage around to see if I could locate the steroids I had purchased just in case.

The time came to go out and join the 40,000 strong herd of masochists and face the reality of the situation. To dilute the gravity of it all we made a list ditch attempt at acting like tourists as opposed to people about to run for hours on end whether their bodies wanted to or not.

Within minutes we had to stop wasting our energy on denial and huddle up to our competition. It was extremely cosy.

After 45 minutes of hoard intimacy we were off. Knowing the elites were already almost half way there was only mildly discouraging!

The next four hours and 15 minutes consisted of optimistic zeal for 90% of the distance and then a need to play questionable mind games with oneself for the last 10%. If I was to break down the experience, it would be as follows:

1-10km – Feeling cocky, thinking that Paris is going to feel so small once I’m done pounding its streets. Energy gel consumed at km 10. Average pace of 5:30 per km. Thinking it was a good idea to revisit Linkin’ Park and trying not to sing along to their songs.

10-20km – Appreciating that the route included a large park with plenty of trees to pee behind. 2nd energy gel consumed at km 20. Average pace of 5:30 per km.

20-30km – Wishing I had legs as long as B’s, at this point I could appreciate the advantage of having legs longer than those of a small rabbit. 3rd gel consumed at km 30. Average pace still 5:30 per km. At this point I lose B because I need to stop to stretch for a few seconds.

30-37km – The mind games kick in. The need to use the toilet revisits me and I am again grateful that there was a second park to run through. I was also grateful that I had one more tissue left. Average pace still 5:30 per km.

37-42km – Torture. Manage to spot and sprint up to B (what a waste of precious energy in retrospect). Average pace drops drastically and the dream of sub 4 evaporates by km 39. Gels no longer make a difference and neither does Kanye West’s nagging.

42 -42.2km – Why? Seriously, why? I heard that the extra 200m was added during the 1908 Olympics so that Queen Alexandra could watch the race from her window. I sincerely hope Karma bit her in the arse.

In the end we were 15 minutes slower than we had both hoped, but for a first attempt it was not a bad time at all. Being the competitive knob that I am, it means that I’ll now have to do another one. As soon as my foot heals.

Oddly enough, more than during the last few km of the race, walking after crossing the finish line was excruciatingly painful.

They made us walk for hundreds of metres and I didn’t have the power or energy to climb over the fence.

Even sitting was a concerted effort and knowing the relief from standing would only be temporary was hard on the tired brain.

In the end we managed to piece ourselves together long enough to take a final picture in which we resemble human beings again. It all fell apart after this picture and I didn’t regain full capacity of my brain until I had stuffed my face with Doritos (we needed the salt), had a shower and napped for two hours.

Surprisingly, that night my appetite was somewhat diminished so the three course meal I was hoping to devour remained only half eaten. My appetite for more marathon running is through the roof though! The Davos Alpine Half will be a great warm up for a sub 4 hour marathon in Luzern this October.