Fits Do Race Reviews: The Athleta Esprit de She 5k

By Jess in Minneapolis

The Athleta Esprit de She 5k debuted last Thursday night at 50th/France in Edina. It was a very fun and exciting running event that just happened to correspond with "Ladies Night Out" at one of my favorite shopping destinations!

The 50th/France shopping area has several great boutiques and stores- Anthropologie, Athleta, Hot Mama, Prana, Fringe, Il Vostro Boutique, Title Nine, and so much more!

For Ladies Night Out, there were so many business offering discounts for participants in the race (full list below) Each runner received two coupons for glasses of bubbly after the race! How fun is that?

Packet Pickup: Packet Pickup was held at slightly random times at the Athleta store at 50th/France. It was on Tuesday from 5-7 pm, Wednesday from 10-12 am, and then Thursday before the race started.   I picked up my packet on Tuesday after work at the Athleta store, which just happened to be having their semi-annual sale…so of course I also picked up a new bikini as well…I couldn’t resist!

Apparently, a few of my older swimsuits are now a little saggy in the bottom, so I was sure to buy one that fits pretty snug in the bum. Athleta's suits a made for someone with a more athletic build- I felt like I could do some serious paddleboard yoga in this one! 

Paddleboard yoga poses like THIS:

Back to the race...
I liked that I could also pick up packets for my friends, without having their driver’s licenses, etc. which was helpful. Unfortunately, though, they ran out of size small singlets, and wouldn’t let my friend Meggan switch to a medium, so she still had to pick hers up at the race. And then at the race, they ran out completely! They did say that they will be shipping her a singlet once they get more in stock, so hopefully that little snafu will be remedied, especially since the singlets are really cute.They are a bright yellow color and a unique style- not just your standard race t-shirt. 

These singlets are actually fun! I give the race swag a 10/10! The goodie bag also offered coupons for $25 off at Prana (a yoga/athletic apparel store) and a free appetizer at the Edina Grill. The bag itself was a nice reusable bag, and it also included a simple workout watch/timer. Sweet!

Race Start: The start time for the race was 6:30 pm. Since the race location was only about a mile from my house, it was easy for my girlfriends and me to run to the start as a warmup. 

We decided to take quite a round-about way, and got in 4.5 miles before the race as a warmup. We did get some crusty looks from the other runners when we arrived at the start line already sweating. I would have expected a little more girl power/female commaderie, like I found at the Women Run the Cities 10 miler a few years ago. That was the only other women-only race I have done, and I remember really loving the energy there. Maybe it was because of the shorter distance of this particular race, but it didn't seem to have the same energy at this event...Don't get me wrong, I'm all about wearing matching outfits for a run (fitness fashion is the name of the game!) but I'm also not afraid to sweat! So maybe others just thought it was odd for us to arrive already sweaty. 

Overall, this wasn't the most competitive 5k out there, though the winner did run a 16:25 (holy moly!).  Yet even with a few faster runners, the three of us "average" runners were pretty comfortable moving up close to the start line, though we didn't quite put our toe on the line, so to speak.

Parking: If you weren't able to jog to the start line, there did appear to be plenty of free parking at the ramps at 50th/France. I would still suggest parking in the Linden Hills or Morningside neighborhoods and jogging to the start so you wouldn't have to worry about getting stuck in a ramp after the race.

Course: The race started and finished at West 51^st Street and Halifax Avenue South right near the 50^thand France business neighborhood. There were a few rolling hills. It was an out and back course, which actually made it go a little faster, since you knew what you were in for, and you knew where the finish line would be, as the start/finish were at the same place. There was limited crowd support- just a few families out in front of their houses cheering, but that's to be expected for a small 5k. The "back" part of the out-and-back course did get a little crowded at one section, when those of us who were running collided into the large groups of walkers going the other way. We ended up squished a bit up on the sidewalk, as the walkers didn't really move to the right to make way.

Post-Race Party: Similar to the Torchlight 5k from last week (read about that race HERE) this 5k was all about the post-race “rendezvous”! There was the aforementioned two glasses of bubbly at the finish and all the shopping and discounts for Ladies Night Out. There was also a photo booth available for funny pictures with your girlfriends. There was Greek yogurt, Starbucks iced coffee, cold towels, water, Gatorade, banans, etc. It was an impressive set up!

I actually finished over a minute faster than last week's Torchlight 5k. The cooler temperatures definitely helped as well as the less crowded start line. It was a nice reminder that a 5k can serve as a fun tempo run as a change of scenery. I ended up with 7.5 miles total for the day, with 3.1 miles at tempo pace, which was almost exactly the workout on my schedule.

Overall Rating: I think I would give this 5k a rating of 8/10. The issues they had weren't that big of a deal, especially considering it was the first year of this race. They'll figure out those little quirks for next year, I'm sure. I'm guessing they had a lot more late registrants, which is why they ran out of singlets. I'm not sure what caused the fifteen minute delay at the start, but again, it didn't ruin the event. I loved the SWAG.

I thought the course and the finish area were very well-organized. Packet pickup was easy, even though the times were a little odd. I love a chip-timed 5k- there are plenty of 5k fun runs out there, so it's nice to do one with an official time. There was quite an impressive list of sponsors as well. I could tell a lot of effort went into planning this event, and I hope to see it continue on in the future. I definitely recommend this one to my running girlfriends!



Discounts At The Esprit De She:

Enjoy the fabulous Ladies' Night Out specials.

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Athleta Esprit de She is excited to be part of the ultimate ladies night out in one of the city’s most desirable shopping destinations. Ladies' Night Out, hosted by the 50^th & France Business Association, will feature hosted activities and shopping discounts from participating businesses during the night market.

50th & France Chiropractic & Wellness		Demonstate Kinesio taping for athletes as well as present information about the clinic
Bluebird Boutique		Featuring athletic/active wear from The Firm.
dpHue		Let's face it, when you look good you feel good! dpHue would like to offer product discounts and free samples, while one lucky lady will win a free dpHue hair makeover!
Edina Hair District		The hair district logo sweat wrist band free with purchase.
Grethen House		Featuring new line of Adidas/Stella McCartney workout wear.
La Bratique		Why Every Woman needs to Invest in the Right sports bra! Coupon at table for 20% off through the end of month.
Mindful Health		Tips for stress-reduction, self-care and living mindfully. Acupuncture demonstations will also be featured.
Mozza Mia		Free food samples and our Martini Special: $10 Tempo Figo Sobieski vodka, muddled orange, cucumber and agave nectar. Skinny and tasty! Plus you get to keep your Mozza Mia martini glass.
Weir Insurance		Handing out Angie's Kettle Corn to participants at the Finish Line!
Arezzo Ristorante	$2.00 glasses of wine and $12.00 bottles of wine with any food purchase (Pinot Grigio, Chardonnay, Merlot, or Cabernet).
Arthur Murray Dance Studio	Come in for a free group class at 7:45 p.m. and/or dance party at 8:30 p.m. Register and receive a free week-long dance membership. ($129 value)
Banana Republic	Receive 25% off of your purchase (certain exclusions apply).
Beaujo's	Extending Happy Hour price until 9 p.m. on heart-healthy wine.
Bluebird Boutique	20% off everything!
Bumbershute	bumbershute wants to thank its customers for five great years in Edina with 20% storewide sale and a fall fashion preview.
Cocina del Barrio	Mamacita cocktail (Hibiscus Margarita) and grilled shrimp with quinoa salad
Cooks of Crocus Hill	15% off good for regularly priced, in-stock merchandise only. Excludes electrics, gift certificates, sale or promotional items, special orders, crop shares, classes and events.
Corset Styling & Fashion Boutique	Free gift for the first 30 guests who visit Corset Styling & Fashion Boutique.
Cos Bar	Meet Julie Maclowe, Vbeaute Founder of Lipspread, an anti-aging hydrating lip gloss; paraben and gluten free, fragance free, and nut and oat free! Complimentary consultations and gifts with qualifying purchases. Celebrity makeup artists.
D'Amico & Sons	Gather the girls for dinner at D'Amico & Sons! We'll be featuring a Ladies' Night Out Healthy Choices menu as well as Ladies' Night Out Wine Specials. Patio seating will be available.
Dana's Apparel	Storewide sale from 5 to 9 p.m.!
dpHue	20% off everything! Because every lady deserves gorgeous hair color.
Edina Grill	Join us for food and drink specials!
Edina Liquor	Free sampling from 4 to 7 p.m. of Smirnoff light sorbet vodkas and cocktails. Drawing for a free bottle and coupons for participants.
Fashion Avenue	Register to win a $100 gift card at the premier upscale resale shop!
Fashionologie	Specials from 4:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., including 15% off denim and 25% off all other purchases.
Fringe	15% off storewide and free earrings with any $50.00 purchase
Gather	Spin the Gather prize wheel when you make your purchase. You can win a gift with purchase or up to 70% off your entire purchase. Every spin is a winner!
Goodnight Moon	Seasonal sale featuring 30 to 75% off.
Grethen House	Free gift.
Hot Mama	15% off entire purchase. Edina location only. Not valid on previous purchases or gift cards.
La Bratique	Invest in the right sports bra! Professional fitting and 20% off any sports bra 30D to 40HH. Best brands on the market for busty women that reduce bounce up to 83%.
Live, Laugh, Love	Run into Live, Laugh, Love for an evening of fun, food and festivities. In-store drawings and free gift with Vera Bradley purchase. Remember you can always find what you want and more at Live, Laugh, Love.
Lush Cosmetics	Drawing for a "Post-Run Wellness Basket" ( a $70-$75 value).
Mozza Mia	Complimentary tomato mozzarella bruschetta with purchase of pizza.
Pacifier	20% off the entire store and 50-70% off summer clothing. Edina location only.
Paperista	Shop with refreshments and enjoy 20% off the entire store*. Stop in for pop-up shop featuring Stella and Dot jewelry. *Excludes custom orders.
prAna	Featuring post-run yoga and a gift card for participants.
R.F. Moeller Jeweler	Ladies join us for "The Price is Right" featuring fabulous prizes and a cool summer drink. R.F. Moeller Jeweler; the place to be cool!
Rice Paper Restaurant	Vietnamese cuisine is considered one of the healthiest in the world for its lightness, freshness and sparse use of oil. To celebrate this night of health, we are highlighting our Indochine Salad with (special LNO price, $7.50) with chicken or tofu. It is a salad tossed in a Vietnamese slaw made of cabbage, which the NY Times recently named one of the healthiest foods, tossed with our popular peanut sauce. Come celebrate health with Rice Paper!
Robert Foote Jeweler	Free jewelry cleaning, complimentary refreshments and $10 off rhodium plating. Plus, enter to win $150 off a custom jewelry mounting.
Room No. 3	Raffling a gift from one of our designer collections offered at Room No. 3! A winner to be announced at the end of the night.
Spalon Montage	25% off any appointment booked that evening, and 25% off all products. We're also offering food, drinks and chair massages. Representatives from our product lines will do demos as well.
STEELE Fitness	Stop by STEELE to experience our award-winning personal training for yourself! Complimentary sessions happening the whole night. Plus, save up to 20% off on active apparel and fitness packages.
Sur La Table	$25.00 gift card drawing.
The Hair District Edina	20% off all retail including Bumble & Bumble, Pureology, Moroccanoil, Bamboo Natural Inspirations and Jane Iredale. Receive a free gift with purchase!
The Optical @ 50th & France	Chanel Trunk Show! $100.00 off a complete pair of prescription eyewear. 20% off non-prescription sunglasses and accessories.

Fitting Debate: Why Women Should Not Run...

By Cool J in Minneapolis

There's a controversial blog post making its way across the interwebs, and I am reposting it here to see what you think. It's entitled, "Why Women Should Not Run."

I love to run, and can't imagine just stopping. However, I do agree that you should never just run. Variety is the spice of life, and exercise variety is also a vital piece of the fitness puzzle. I struggle to find time to fit in all the other "spices" while marathon training, but I recognize how important strength training, yoga, and anaerobic exercise are to overall fitness.

As mean as it sounds, I do know lots of "fat-skinny" runners. Just go watch a marathon, and you'll wonder to yourself...how is THAT guy able to run so fast? I personally noticed a drastic weight loss only during my first marathon training period. Since then, my weight has pretty much remained constant, even though I'm burning 2,000 calories before 10 am on any given Saturday.  Has my body adjusted, as this article would argue, in such a way that now my metabolism has slowed, and my body is retaining fat?

Read this article (posted below), and let me know what you think in this fitting debate.
Should women not run?

Deep in debate...perhaps about whether women should run?

From: http://www.dangerouslyhardcore.com/5343/why-women-should-not-run/

WHY WOMEN SHOULD NOT RUN:

"I’m not sympathetic. 

When I look at the fat guy in the gym wasting his time doing forearm curls to lose weight, I feel no sympathy. When a big tough meathead gets stapled to the bench by 365 pounds—after trying and failing with 315—I don’t feel any sympathetic pangs there, either. Even when I see a girl spend a half hour bouncing back and forth between the yes-no machines—the adductor and abductor units—only to have trouble walking the next day, I can’t muster even an iota of pathos.

Nobody told these people to do these things.

Then, however, I watch my friend Jessica running on the treadmill—day after day, year after year—like a madwoman, and going nowhere. Her body seems to get softer with every mile, and the softer she gets, the more she runs. For her, I feel sympathy, because the world has convinced her that running is the way to stay “slim and toned.”

There’s a Jessica in every gym. Spotting them is easy. They’re the women who run for an hour or more every day on the treadmill, setting new distance and/or time goals every week and month. Maybe they’re just interested in their treadmill workouts, maybe they’re training for their fifth fund-raising marathon, or maybe they’re even competing against runners in Finland via some Nike device. Doesn’t matter to me, because years of seeing my friend on the treadmill has exposed the results, which I’m not going to sugarcoat:

She’s still fat. Actually, she’s gotten fatter.

I’ve tried to rescue her from the clutches of cardio in the past, but my efforts didn’t work until a month ago, when she called to tell me that a blood test had confirmed her doctor’s suspicion: She had hypothyroidism, meaning her body no longer made enough thyroid hormone.

Her metabolism had slowed to a snail’s pace, and the fat was accumulating. This was her body rebelling. When Jessica asked for my advice, I told her to do two things: To schedule a second test for two weeks later, and to stop all the goddamned running until then.

I’m not here to pick on women or make fun of them. There are men out there who do the same thing, thinking cardio will wipe away the effects of their regular weekend beer binges. It’s more of a problem with women, though, and I’m targeting them for three very good reasons:

1.  They’re often intensely recruited for fund-raisers like Team-In-Training, lured by the promises of slim, trim bodies and good health resulting from the months of cardio training leading to marathons—in addition to doing something for charity.

2.  Some physique coaches prescribe 20-plus hours per week of pre-contest cardio for women, which essentially amounts to a part-time job.

3.  Steady-state activities like this devastate the female metabolism. This happens with men, too, but in different ways.

I hate a lot of things about the fitness industry, but over-prescribed cardio would have to be at the very top of my list. I’m not talking about walking here, nor am I referring to appropriate HIIT cardio. This is about running, cycling, stair-climbing, or elliptical cardio done for hours at or above 65 percent of your max heart rate. The anaerobic threshold factors into this, obviously, but I’m painting gym cardio in very broad strokes here so everyone will understand what I’m railing against.

Trashing steady-state cardio isn’t exactly a novel idea, and the better physique gurus figured at least a portion of this out years ago, when they started applying the no-steady-state-cardio rule to contest preparation. They failed, however, to point out the most detrimental effect of this type of training—one that applies specifically to women:

Studies—both clinical and observational—make a compelling case that too much cardio can impair the production of the thyroid hormone T3, its effectiveness and metabolism, particularly when accompanied by caloric restriction, an all too common practice. This is why many first or second-time figure and bikini competitors explode in weight when they return to their normal diets, and it’s why the Jessicas of the world can run for hours every week with negative results.

T3 is the body’s preeminent regulator of metabolism, by the way it throttles the efficiency of cells. It also acts in various ways to increase heat production. As I pointed out in previous articles, this is one reason why using static equations to perform calories-in, calories-out weight loss calculations doesn’t work.

When T3 levels are normal, the body burns enough energy to stay warm, and muscles function at moderate efficiency. When there’s too much thyroid hormone (hyperthyroidism), the body goes into a state where weight gain is almost impossible. Too little T3 (hypothyroidism), and the body accumulates body fat with ease, almost regardless of physical activity level. Women inadvertently put themselves into a hypothyroid condition when they perform so much steady-state cardio.

In the quest to lose body fat, T3 levels can offer both success and miserable failure because of the way it influences other fat-regulating hormones. Women additionally get all the other negative effects of this, which I’ll cover below. Don’t be surprised here. This is a simple, sensible adaptation of a body that’s equipped to bear the full brunt of reproduction.

Think about it this way: Your body is a responsive, adaptive machine that has evolved for survival. If you’re running on a regular basis, your body senses this excessive energy expenditure, and adjusts to compensate. Remember, no matter which way we hope the body works, its endgame is always survival. If you waste energy running, your body will react by slowing your metabolism to conserve energy. Decreasing energy output is biologically savvy for your body. Your body wants to survive longer while you do what it views as a stressful, useless activity. Decreasing T3 production increases efficiency and adjusts your metabolism to preserve energy immediately.

Nothing exemplifies this increasing efficiency better than the way the body starts burning fuel. Training consistently at 65 percent or more of your max heart rate adapts your body to save as much body fat as possible. After regular training, fat cells stop releasing fat the way they once did during moderate-intensity activities. Energy from body fat stores also decreases by 30 percent. To this end, your body sets into motion a series of reactions that make it difficult for muscle to burn fat at all. Instead of burning body fat, your body takes extraordinary measures to retain it.

Still believe cardio is the fast track to fat loss?

That’s not all. You can still lose muscle mass. Too much steady-state cardio actually triggers the loss of muscle. This seems to be a twofold mechanism, with heightened and sustained cortisol levels triggering muscle loss. which upregulates myostatin, a potent destroyer of muscle tissue. Say goodbye to bone density, too, because it declines with that decreasing muscle mass and strength.

And long term health? Out the window, as well. Your percentage of muscle mass is an independent indicator of health. You’ll lose muscle, lose bone, and lose health. Awesome, right?

When sewn together, these phenomena coordinate a symphony of fat gain for most female competitors after figure contests. After a month—or three—of 20-plus hours of cardio per week, fat burning hits astonishing lows, and fat cells await an onslaught of calories to store. The worst thing imaginable in this state would be to eat whatever you wanted, whenever you wanted. The combination of elevated insulin and cortisol would make you fat, and it would also create new fat cells so you could become even fatter.

I won’t name names, but I’ve seen amazing displays of gluttony from some small, trim women. Entire pizzas disappear, leaving only the flotsam of toppings that fell during the feeding frenzy. Appetizers, meals, cocktails and desserts—4000 calories worth—vanish at the Cheesecake Factory. There are no leftovers, and there are no crumbs. Some women catch this in time and stop the devastation, but others quickly swell, realizing that this supposed off-season look has become their every-season look.

And guess what they do to fix it? Double sessions of cardio.

This “cardio craze” is a form of insanity, and it’s on my hit list. I’m determined to kill it. There are better ways to lose fat, and there are better ways to look good. Your bikini body is not at the end of a marathon, and you won’t find it on a treadmill. In fact, it’s quite the opposite if you’re using steady-state cardio to get there. The show may be over, and the finish line crossed, but the damage to your metabolism has just begun.

Don’t want to stop running? Fine. Then stop complaining about how the fat won’t come off your hips, thighs, and ass. You’re keeping it there.

And as for Jessica, my friend whose dilemma sparked this article? She took my suggestion and cut out the cardio. Two weeks later, her T3 count was normal. Go figure."