Metro Fitness Club Blogger Bash

Whew!  It's been an jam-packed weekend of activity. 

Let's back up to Friday night.  I got off work and had thought about what was ahead of me this weekend.  I knew I potentially had A LOT going on and Friday night was actually pretty clear.  I started thinking it might make sense to knock out my long run for the week Friday night so I wouldn't have worry about when I'd get it done all weekend.

One of my co-workers and his wife are training for a half marathon the same weekend as mine and I happened to run into him and chat with him about it this week at work.  I emailed Katy to see if she'd like to run together Friday night.  The cool part?  They live about 4.5 miles from my house.  A plan quickly came together and we decided I would drive over to Katy's house, start from there, and then we'd run to my house for water/fuel, and then run back for a full 9 miles.

The plan worked out pretty well.  Our biggest problem ended up being that it was PITCH BLACK outside for most of the second half of the run.  I was definitely glad we were together because that would have been scary to run alone in the darkness. 

We did our 9 miles in 1 hour and 41 minutes

Mile 1- 11:16

Mile 2- 10:44

Mile 3- 10:49

Mile 4- 11:38

Mile 5- 12:08

Mile 6- 11:41

Mile 7- 11:04

Mile 8- 10:57

Mile 9- 11:14

Our route was actually just shy of 9 miles, and I made Katy run around her cul-de-sac with me until my Garmin beeped, cuz I'm hardcore like that...lol.

After our run we called my hubby and he met me at their house with pizza and beer so the four of us could hang out a bit.  It was a fun night!

Saturday morning I got up and got prepped to go to a Blogger event at Metro Fitness Club, a relatively new gym in Charlotte.  Six of us arrived at 9:30am to get a tour and sampling of workouts they offer from two different trainers.



Katie and I arrived first and took a quick peek of the locker room.  Nice digs :)

Six Charlotte bloggers (including myself) attended, and the gym staff got right into showing us around.

I loved the look of the gym.  Everything is new, modern, and sleek. 

They even feature artwork on their walls :)

This area of the gym features this unique piece of equipment called PureMotion that houses many different exercise stations on it for working differnet muscle groups.  Pretty cool!

Next we stepped over to an area of the gym where they actually have astro-turf!  They use it for a couple sled-type devices that you push and pull across the turf.  I actually got to try that first hand later.

There was no shortage of free weights at Metro!

They also have an area for CrossFit type workouts where you rotate between a few different exercises in an allotted amount of time.

This is actually where our workout at Metro Fitness began.  CrossFit is something I've been wanting to try! 

We rotated through each station as many times as we could in a 15 minute period. 

1.  250 meters on the rower,

2. 10 jumps on to boxes. 

3.  Weighted ball toss and squat 10 times. 

This was tough!  We were all ready for water and a minute to breathe by the end of this workout.

Then it was over to the PureMotion equipment and turf for more.  We had 7 stations of different exercises we rotated through. 

1. a suspension push-up

2.  a "toss" of a weighted bar

3. tricep dips

4. pull-ups on a huge rope

5. step-ups while holding a large weight

6. pulling a weighted sleigh with ropes over the astro turf

7.  pushing a weighted sleigh over the astro turf

I thought these were the most challenging of everything we tried.  I would need a lot more practice to get good at these exercises.  It was humbling to see how weak I was at a few of them!

To finish, we did another rotation of three exercises:

1.  Rock climbers, in which we wore shoe covers over our shoes on a slippery mat

2.  Plank ab work on the turf (we raised each arm and leg)

3.  Sprints and back-pedal around a step

We finished up with lots of blogger pictures.

Katie, Me, Nicole, Jen, Cassandra, and Kelly

On our way out, we got some swag!



My impression of Metro Fitness Club was great.  The facility (as you can see) was totally swanky and cool.  The staff is friendly, helpful, and strives to challenge you.  I felt like there was a lot of personal attention to go around there.  If you did the workout they had us doing a few times a week, I imagine you'd be pretty ripped after a while. 

Thank you to Metro Fitness and to Gwen who invited me!  I had a great time!