I've always thought it would be a good idea to try to make more girls' nights active rather than a wine/food fest. (not that I have any problem with my wine/food fests). But, you know, it would be smart to do things like spin or box and THEN get a bev! Anyway, last night was exactly that!

New Balance has been throwing these Girls Night Out bashes a few times this summer. Last night, I went to my first one and brought Kim and Rebecca along with me.

The goal of these events is to get active, social women together to achieve their fitness goals and have a lot of fun together. Last night's theme was "Self Expression". Fellow fitness blogger Rachel from "Healthy Chicks" lead the event and talked about what "Self Expression" in fitness means to her. She talked through how much her workouts have changed since college (hours on the elliptical then vs. diverse training now) and I have a feeling that a lot of the women in the room could relate. Working out to just burn calories and be skinny is not the best form of self-expression. Working out to be HEALTHY and FIT, is a much better way to express yourself with fitness.

I think a lot of women struggle with this in their early 20's and even later in life. Do you feel like you are truly expressing your truest self with how you currently take care of yourself? Something that I learned in my 20's is that the more I focused on HEALTH as the goal of my fitness, the happier and more confident I became with myself. When you stop focusing on being 'skinny' and start paying attention to how your body feels when you lift a weight, strike a (yoga) pose, finish a race, hit a punching bag... you'll realize that feeling strong and confident outweighs all that heavy-on-the-mind 'skinny' stuff. And guess what? All of a sudden you'll start to look the way you feel. Honest!

Moving on... I love these events because I get to catch up with the local bloggers that I respect and follow! Athena from Fitness and Feta, is pictured to the left of me - we have matching New Balance 'anue collection' shirts on. Her blog is really great - I highly reccomend it! As Kim said "oh two things I love - workouts and cheese" lol

After we all caught up for a bit - we headed to our workouts. Kim, Becca and I headed over to the Equinox Roof Deck for a METCON3 class, Athena did FlyWheel outside, and Rachel did the fun run.

When we got to Equinox, I saw this cool obstacle course and I was JONESIN' to play on it. Instead, we did the class and it was great!! (I still wanted to hit the monkey bars though - next time)