Rising to the Challenge…with Kettlebells

“One more rep, a few more pounds, another breath,” writes injured strongman N.C. Harrison. “As the world moves, so must I.”

Challenges are the only thing that keep us going, as human beings. This is why, after finding out that my knees were too bad to continue playing football or wrestling after high school, I immediately started running—not much, at first, just a little bit—because it was something that I had never been good at. I could handle five miles in about forty-five minutes, two years later. It was an ugly, shambling gait, sort of like a bear set free at the Olympics and convinced he could run the mile, and was horrendous on my knees but, by thunder, I was doing it!

This changed when I came down with chemical pneumonia as a result of being exposed to some seriously strong industrial cleaning agents where I worked part-time during college. I couldn’t run farther than one hundred yards. Heck, I couldn’t walk up the stairs to my anthropology of religion class without getting so winded that I had to sit still and rest a few minutes. Just getting through the day and not dying of an asthma attack while watching Star Trek: The Next Generation was a particularly vicious challenge. “Invictus” became a particularly meaningful poem to me, for a time.

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It didn’t last forever, though– just over two years. I have never started running again (the pressure on my knees was just too much and I realize that now) but immediately jumped into the world of powerlifting as soon as I could draw in a deep enough breath to brace against a big deadlift. I worked hard and started putting up pretty serious numbers—within fifty pounds of an elite raw score for my weight class—and experimenting with other strength sports like Olympic lifting, strongman sport and Crossfit Total, too.

Bill Grundler competes a 2-pood kettlebell workout.

I’m on a sabbatical from my dearly beloved sport of picking up heavy things and putting them down again, though. It came about as a result of helping my mother do some house-cleaning last year. An old-timey tube television that weighed as much as I do winged by foot on its way to perdition, back in November. It was, all told, a heck of a birthday present from the universe. The foot was broken, I’m pretty sure, but all in all I’m just lucky that it didn’t end up separated from my body. I called that television everything but a child of God in the heat of the moment, and when I ran out of profanities to call it, I started making my own. It eventually, sort of became its own language, caught between the speech of men, beasts and devils. This was, I imagine, similar to how Tolkien developed the Quenya tongue. Well, sort of like the great professor creating Elvish if he had been a merchant mariner on peyote and frightened by a vision of the kraken, but close enough for government work.

It’s been months since what I now call “the television bombing.” I can’t stand up under eighty percent of my old squat max and even getting the leg drive together to push a respectable bench press feels akin to putting my foot in a vice grip. I still have to find a challenge, though–I can’t live without one. Kettlebells have been a saving grace to my fitness and sanity during this time. It didn’t take long to pass Pavel’s first benchmark of girevoy success, swinging a 32kg kettlebell one hundred times in under five minutes, followed it swiftly by performing the RKC minimum one hundred snatches in five minutes with the 24kg bell, and almost immediately leapt into Valery Fedorenko’s wonderful developments of kettlebell StrongSport and the kettlebell pentathlon. Then, shortly after playing with these notions for a while, I came across Dan John’s 10,000 swing kettlebell challenge.

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Challenge. The very word excited me. That’s what I love. “Working out” always felt silly… a challenge felt like I was doing something. So, yeah, it was tossing around a cannonball with a purse strap, and not climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro…but hey, it was still cool. I’m a week into this mad genius’ program, with about two thousand swings down and eight thousand to go, and am typing this mostly to remind my hands that they are attached to a human body. My fingers feel like they’ve been chewed, and as the companion to five small dogs (including two lhasa apsos that gnaw like little beavers) I am very familiar with that sensation. It’s okay, though. The blisters and torn calluses remind me that I’m alive, and someone has to keep the makers of cornhusker’s lotion in business. I have listened to Tennessee Ernie Ford singing “Sixteen Tons” on repeat so many times that the CD is wearing out like a record, and it seems appropriate given my approximate daily total volume.

I’m about to go and face the day’s five hundred swings now. My hips and back will feel like they’re on fire, and my forearms could very easily swell up like Popeye’s—I’ve felt more camaraderie with the old sailor than is probably healthy in recent weeks. The work will remind me that I’m alive, though, and moving forward. Like a shark, I’ve never been able to stop swimming. One more rep, a few more pounds, another breath. As the world moves, so must I.

Photo–Flickr/Andrew Malone

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