Tears streamed down my face as I ran the final meters to the finish line of my first mountain trail ultramarathon. Overwhelmed by a mix of anger, gratitude and relief, I could barely breathe. My left knee was swollen and bleeding heavily. My hip ached. My right arm and hand were scraped raw. “I fell just a few meters before the finish” I told the medics that I did seek out to help me clean my wounds. I assured them that I was feeling fine. I only would like to have the wounds cleaned up. But they didn’t want to let me go. Something about the swelling in my knee and hip had them concerned. So instead of celebrating my sixth-place finish with my teammates, I spent the night in a German small-town hospital.
And while I didn’t break anything (or worse), the injuries forced me to cancel my next race. It was the first time in my entire ultrarunning career that an injury had cost me a start line. But not only that. It was also the only injury I incurred during the past 5 years of ultrarunning and 11 years of kettlebell training.
But my body was not always so durable. Quite the opposite. My first attempts at developing a fitness routine in my 20’s left me constantly injured and burnt out.
It wasn’t until I discovered kettlebell training at age 30 that I learned how to challenge my body without breaking it.
The Long Way Round
I grew up hating my body. Being bullied at school and called “the fatty” by my alcoholic step-father instilled in me the belief that I was ugly and unlovable. I was extremely socially anxious and exercising in front of those who would regularly laugh at you and call you names felt more than just uncomfortable. PE class was a weekly public humiliation. When I left school I genuinely believed I hated exercise just as much as I hated my body.
And when I started to run as a 21-year old forestry student my goal was to lose weight. I wasn’t overweight by any objective standard, but when I looked in a mirror (a rare occurrence because I actively avoided mirrors), I saw a fat person.
At first, I hated running with a passion. The rapid heartbeat, the heavy breathing, the sweating. But I kept at it. I was running in the morning before work through a forestry plantation in South Africa and there was no one to judge me. It was only me, the sun and the strange sounds of a bird that I didn’t know. And to my surprise, I fell in love with running over the next few months.
But I still hated my body.
No amount of weight I lost ever felt enough. So I pushed further and restricted my food more. And when I got injured, instead of giving my body the building blocks it needed to heal itself, I restricted myself even more. It was a perpetuum mobile of self-destruction. Injury led to restriction, which led to more injury. I was unable to build a consistent running routine, but couldn’t see the mechanism at the time. I just thought my body was failing me.
When I decided to quit running in 2013 I was broken physically and mentally and thought I would never run again. The dream of completing an ultramarathon one day would remain just that – a dream. But I wasn’t done yet with trying to force my body into being thin. Over the next year I tried biking and hiking, but didn’t really enjoy either. I also signed up for a gym but I only went twice. The anxiety of exercising in a room with mirrors and strangers around me was just too much to handle.
When I found kettlebells one evening scrolling through online bodybuilding forums, what drew me in was a single claim: the kettlebell swing was described as burning more fat than running. For someone who had given up running and was still looking for a way to shrink herself, that was exactly the right bait. No gym required. No mirrors, no strangers watching. Just me and a piece of cast iron in my living room. I ordered two kettlebells and a book without thinking much about it.
When two kettlebells arrived just a few weeks later at my doorstep, I had no idea that these cannonballs with a handle would completely rewire how I understood my body and how I approached training. And I wouldn’t have believed if you told me back then that what I would learn through kettlebell training would allow me to return to running at 36 and build the injury-free athletic career I’d given up on at 28.
The strength kettlebells gave me mattered. But it’s not the main thing they gave me. The main thing was the principles. And those principles changed everything.
Most of the principles emerged from training. From years of being forced, by the nature of kettlebell work itself, into a different way of paying attention. And then from slowly, sometimes reluctantly, realising that the same logic applied to every aspect of physical fitness and how I treated my body.
Principle 1: Curiosity Over Control
For most of my life, my relationship with my body was a power struggle. Control was my weapon of choice in the war against my body. I felt like I needed to control its weight and its shape and forced my ideas of how much exercise was needed and how much food was allowed onto it. I never asked for cooperation and ignored any protests for as long as possible.
And when it got injured, I got furious and called my body names that were even worse than what those bullies at school came up with. When I couldn’t move as much as I wanted, I restricted food harder. I learned to ignore the episodes of almost fainting on my morning walks and pushed through the extreme tiredness I felt.
Force was always the answer. And it worked, until my body said no more. Back then, I didn’t know there were other tools. But then I found kettlebells.
Kettlebells introduced me, slowly, to a different question. Not “what can I force my body to do?” but “what does my body need right now?”
The mechanism was simple and unforgiving: you cannot bully a kettlebell. You cannot press a weight your body isn’t ready for — it will not move. No amount of willpower substitutes for actual preparation. The bell tells you exactly where your preparation ends. Every session. Every rep.
That feedback loop started doing something to me. The anger I used to feel when my body didn’t cooperate began to shift into something more like curiosity. If I can’t press this weight yet, what’s actually missing? If my hip is tight today, why? If my swing looks like that in the video, what’s going on?
That shift — from force to questions — sounds small. It wasn’t. When your default response to a struggling body is to push harder, you stop receiving information. The signal gets overridden before you can read it. A niggle becomes something to grind through, not something to investigate. And by the time your body is loud enough that you can’t ignore it anymore, you’re already injured.
Curiosity works differently. A tight hip becomes a question, not an obstacle. A session that feels wrong becomes data, not a personal failing. You start noticing patterns — what conditions precede good sessions, what you were ignoring in the two weeks before something went wrong. The body stops being the enemy and starts being the most reliable source of information you have.
There’s no failure when you’re genuinely curious — only feedback. And once I started operating from curiosity rather than control, I stopped being at war with my body every time something didn’t go to plan.
I still train hard. I still want results. But I don’t view my body as the enemy anymore. She is the partner I need to take care of if I want to continue to experience unforgettable adventures.
Principle 2: Body Awareness
I spent the better part of two decades not wanting to be in my body.
The bullying had taught me it was something to be ashamed of. The years of disordered eating had taught me to treat it as an obstacle — something that kept demanding food and rest when it should just comply. I avoided mirrors. I disconnected from my own signals. I learned to be somewhere else, mentally, whenever my body was uncomfortable.
Running had enabled this beautifully. I could zone out for entire sessions. Ignore a niggle for twenty kilometres. Drift. Dissociate. Grind through things I shouldn’t have been grinding through. I thought I was being tough. What I was actually doing was not listening.
Kettlebells ended that option.
You cannot drift during a heavy press. You cannot tune out with a kettlebell overhead. Your whole body needs to be coordinated — lats engaged, core braced, shoulder stacked — and if you lose that for even a moment, the bell tells you immediately. Not three weeks later with a stress fracture. Right now, in this rep.
What I was building without having a word for it was interoception: the ability to accurately sense what’s happening inside your body in real time. The granular difference between productive fatigue and wrong fatigue. The twinge that means pay attention and the one that means stop. The breath that says I’m working hard and the one that says something is off.
There’s a growing body of research on this. Athletes with higher interoceptive accuracy regulate their effort better, recover more appropriately, and have significantly lower rates of overuse injury. It makes sense when you think about it: most overuse injuries don’t arrive without warning. They arrive after a long series of warnings that were ignored. Better body awareness means you catch things earlier — at the stage when they’re still information rather than injury.
There’s also an irony worth naming. The explosion of wearables — GPS watches, heart rate monitors, training load trackers — has given athletes more data about their bodies than ever before. It has also, for many athletes, eroded the skill of actually listening to those bodies. When you trust the watch over what you’re feeling in your legs, when you push through a warning signal because the numbers look fine, you stop developing the internal feedback system. The device becomes the authority. Your body becomes background noise.
I use data. But it doesn’t override what I feel. Over eleven years, my body has been a more accurate and reliable source of information than any device I’ve used — because I spent those eleven years learning how to actually hear it.
In the past 5 years of ultrarunning I haven’t had a single overuse-injury. No stress fractures, no IT band syndrome, no plantar fasciitis, no runner’s knee. Not because I train easy. Because I don’t ignore the early signals anymore.
Principle 3: Active Over Passive Movement
Once you start inhabiting your body rather than just dragging it along, you begin to see movement differently. Most recreational runners move passively. They fall forward and catch themselves. Glutes off, core absent, arms decorative. The legs do the work. Everything else is along for the ride.
I was one of these runners. In my earlier years I moved, covered distance, experienced effort — but I was not particularly in my body while I did it. Form deteriorated when I was tired and I didn’t notice, because I wasn’t present enough to feel it.
The research on what this actually costs is sobering. Between 37% and 63% of recreational runners get injured every year. A 2023 study of 616 recreational runners found that 84% had an injury history, and nearly half had been injured in the previous twelve months alone. The two risk factors that surface most consistently are inadequate hip muscle stabilisation and poor neuromuscular control during gait. Not mileage. Not shoes. How the body is organised while it moves.
Passive running doesn’t feel dangerous. That’s the problem. You cover the distance. You get the kilometres in. The loading accumulates silently until something finally gives, and the injury feels sudden even though it wasn’t.
Kettlebell training makes passive movement impossible. A swing demands hip power, core bracing, lat engagement, breath timing — all of it coordinated and intentional, all of it right now. A Turkish get-up requires full-body awareness at every stage with no momentum to cheat from. Nothing is inert. Nothing coasts. The pattern transfers into everything.
I run with my glutes working, my core present, my arms purposeful. Not stiffly — but awake. When I’m twenty hours into a race and genuinely depleted, I can still feel when my form is starting to collapse under fatigue — and I can do something about it, because I’m actually in there, paying attention.
That skill didn’t come from running more. It came from years of training where switching off wasn’t an option.
Principle 4: Training as Practice, Not Performance
For most of my athletic life, I measured the quality of a workout by how destroyed I felt afterward. If I could still walk properly the next day, I wouldn’t have worked hard enough. Easy days felt like laziness disguised as training. Suffering was the currency — the more you spent, the more progress you earned.
The kettlebell school I learned under – StrongFirst – dismantled that. Their philosophy is simple and, when you first encounter it, slightly uncomfortable: the goal of every session is to practice a skill. Not to exhaust yourself. Not to prove anything. To practice.
There’s a concept in that world that I’ve thought about hundreds of times since I first encountered it: the next training session is the most important one.
If the next session is the most important one, then your job in today’s session is to finish it ready to train again. Not destroyed. Not depleted. Ready. The heroic workout that leaves you unable to move for three days is, by this logic, a bad workout — regardless of how hard it felt or what it seemed to prove.
Form is the other side of this. In kettlebell training, a rep with broken form is not a rep. You’re not building the movement you want — you’re engraving the movement you have. You stop, reset, and do it right. Or you stop for the day. This is non-negotiable, and internalising it changes how you approach every session.
The question stops being “how much can I do?” and starts being “what is actually worth doing?“
I stopped racing in training. One hundred percent is for race day. Training is where I build the body and the skills that will race. I train hard — consistently, seriously — but there’s always a ceiling, and the ceiling is: can I do this again tomorrow? Can I sustain this across months, across years?
My training log is the proof. Eleven years. No forced rest. No weeks lost to overuse injuries. Just consistent, compounding practice — and what that produces over a long enough timeline.
Principle 5: The Adaptation Timeline Is Non-Negotiable
In my 20s, I could run further than my body was prepared for. I know this because I did it, repeatedly. You can ignore niggles, override signals, push through discomfort, and cover distances your connective tissue isn’t structurally ready for. Running permits this — for a while.
Kettlebells don’t. You cannot lift a weight your body isn’t prepared for. It will not move. No amount of desire or toughness changes the equation. The weight sits on the floor and tells you exactly where your preparation ends. I came to understand this not as a limitation but as the most honest feedback loop I have ever encountered in training.
When people start running — or return to it after a break — the cardiovascular system adapts surprisingly fast. Within weeks, breathing gets easier, heart rate drops, effort feels more manageable. Muscles strengthen. The body starts to feel capable. Ready, even.
The connective tissue is on a different schedule entirely. Tendons, ligaments, and the collagen structures that hold everything together adapt far more slowly than muscles and lungs.
The danger is the gap between how you feel and what your body is actually ready for. You feel fit. Your lungs are happy. Your legs feel strong. And your tendons are quietly accumulating a deficit they haven’t told you about yet. The injury, when it comes, feels sudden. It wasn’t. It was weeks or months of load your connective tissue wasn’t structurally prepared to absorb, finally reaching a threshold.
This was the exact mechanism behind every injury I had in my 20s. I felt good, so I trained more. The signals were there — they always are, in retrospect. I just didn’t pay attention to them, and I didn’t understand why patience mattered.
Kettlebell training forced me to develop patience in a way running never had. In the StrongFirst system, you don’t add weight until the current weight is genuinely easy — smooth, controlled, almost effortless. You build neural efficiency and structural adaptation rather than creating fatigue and breakdown.
It felt almost lazy to me at first. My whole conditioning said harder, more, faster is always better. But the results were undeniable: consistent progress, year after year, without breakdown.
I rest with intention now. A rest day when something feels off isn’t weakness. It’s protecting the next thousand training days instead of proving something in one session.
Accepting this also changed something deeper. The athlete I was in my 20s was fighting her biology — desperate, urgent, trying to extract everything possible from a body she didn’t trust to last.
The athlete I am now works with her biology. I’m building something for decades, not a season. I have a future as an athlete. For most of my athletic life, I didn’t actually believe that.
The timeline isn’t an obstacle. It’s the mechanism.
Five Principles, One System
These five principles are not five separate tools. They are one interconnected system, and they reinforce each other in ways that only become clear when you try to use one without the others.
Curiosity over control is the foundation. Without it, the other four don’t hold. Training as practice requires genuine curiosity, because practice is only possible when you care about the quality of what you’re building rather than controlling how it looks from the outside.
The adaptation timeline only becomes your ally when you’re curious enough to accept what your body is actually telling you rather than overriding it. Body awareness only develops when you’ve replaced the drive to dominate your body with genuine interest in understanding it.
Active movement is only possible when you’re present enough to feel the difference between generating force and simply surviving contact with the ground.
Each principle also addresses a specific failure mode I spent years living inside.
Curiosity addresses the adversarial relationship. Body awareness addresses the disconnection. Active movement addresses passivity. Training as practice addresses the performance anxiety. The adaptation timeline addresses the urgency and the self-destruction. Together they don’t just change how you train. They change what it means to be in your body at all.
The woman who stood at a gym door in 2015 and couldn’t make herself go in was not lacking fitness or talent. She was carrying years of being told her body was wrong. Years of trying to force it into compliance. Years of injury and shame and the deep conviction that bodies like hers weren’t built for this.
Two kettlebells and a book didn’t fix that. But the practice they introduced — years of learning to listen, to be curious, to inhabit movement rather than just perform it — slowly did something that willpower and punishment never could: it made my body feel like somewhere I was allowed to be.
And from that foundation, everything became possible. The ultras. The podiums. The hundred-miler. The 24-hour races. The training weeks that would have destroyed the version of me who couldn’t stop fighting her own biology.
The body I have now is not the body I thought I deserved in my 20s. It is the body I built by finally stopping trying to break it into something else.