Food + Fitness: My first Cathe Road Trip!

Standing in the middle of Cathe's fitness room before our step class
See if you can find me in the pic of ALL of us below :)
(You can click on it to make it bigger)

(This photo was taken by Cyndi)

Ever since I started doing Cathe Friedrich's workouts (on video way back in the 1900's), I have heard about road trips to Cathe's health club in Glassboro, New Jersey. I had no idea exactly where Glassboro was or what her gym was like, but I thought it sounded like fun to workout with Cathe in real life. In the back of my brain somewhere, I realized that this was a stretch for me to ever be able to go. For one thing, I had 5 children at the time under the age of 9. But I also lived on the opposite coast, so it wasn't a hop, skip or a jump to get there! As the years have passed and my now 6 children have grown somewhat, I've tried to figure out a way to go on the road trip, but never got close.

Meanwhile, I've been buying and doing her workouts as they come my way. Cathe is just as much a part of my daily routine as kissing my husband goodbye or brushing my teeth. I've smiled my way through her stellar step routines, "Hoooahh!"ed through punching and kicking combos, and have pushed myself through a plethora of plyos in her HiiT workouts (High Intensity Interval Training). Her weight workouts expand the realm of Gym Style workouts with barbells and free weights as well as functional fitness and metabolic training with firewalker bands, slide & glide discs, tubing, and (my favorite), the stability ball. I'm sure I'd do her workout library a disservice by trying to lump them all into one paragraph. If you'd like to come over some afternoon, I could show you my dvd collection and tell you the ins and outs of each and every workout. Or just click on her name in the right column of my blog to what I've written about her workouts. I can see I'm clearly behind on that. I've done at least 60 of her workouts and only have 13 posts. Oh well!

Back to the Road Trip, I finally went this year! I can hardly believe it myself now that I'm back. Last summer, my friend Mandy, (who introduced me to Cathe's workouts), told me that she wanted me to go on the road trip with her next time. I told her I'd do it. I didn't know how it would work, but I decided to plan on it. We didn't really have the money for it, but when January rolled around and it was time to sign up (they sell out in the first 5 minutes), we did have some money and my husband had just told me (long story), that I should take $1,000 and spend it on myself. I knew JUST what to spend it on!

Yep, I'm happy!

So I signed up on that fateful day, was caught in the server crash and all the heartbreak that so many others experienced thinking they wouldn't get in (or actually NOT getting in), but after getting wait listed (I was 161 and only the first 105 got to go), I received an email a few hours later saying that I was actually in the first 105. The server had signed up many Cathletes two or three times, which made the wait list inaccurate.

High-5ing Cathe after doing a little Step with her on the set!

Then the fun began! I bought my plane ticket and reserved a room at the hotel. I soon found out about a private Facebook group for all Road Trippers and could ask ANY question I wanted to in preparation for the trip. I learned more than anything, that this was one FUN bunch of women and I was privileged to go with them!

But enough of the preliminaries! I'm sure you'd really just like to hear about the Road Trip! Or better yet, see pictures! Cathe has two photographers taking photos at the road trip -- Steve (her photographer for videos and promos) and Cyndi (who is also a Cathlete. You can find their photos here on Flickr. I'll post some of mine, too!

Let's see, how should I do this? Maybe I'll post about each day separately like I did when I went on my Beachbody trip to film with Debbie Siebers LONG ago. In fact, I should put those posts on one of my tabs up above so you can read what it's like to be involved in the filming of an exercise video. Very fun!

Okay, I'll post a variety of photos for now and will write about each day of the Road Trip one by one later on. Stay tuned!