Don’t Let the Fit Hit the Fan…

Easy Ways to Enjoy a Weekend without Undoing Your Work-Week Workouts

By Molly McGrath

The work-week is crazy, at times leaving little room for fun. Then the weekend arrives and friends begin to call up to make plans… meet for coffee? Pastries included. Movie date? Popcorn and Milk Duds please. Want to check out that new restaurant? I hear the dessert menu’s great.

Why is it that sometimes all there is to do is eat? Not only that, but all there is to do is sit still and eat. I sit at a desk all week and squeeze exercise classes into the spare hours between work and sleep, then my beloved weekend comes along with its promises of fun and lures me into a haven of delicious bad decisions.

It can be very hard to find a balance between a healthy lifestyle and a fun one. But, once again, our beautiful state provides. Here are some great ideas to fill your free time with fitness… and not even notice it.

Dance Parties!

Friday nights try “Swinging with Simone’s Jersey Bounce!” in Montclair. Learn the dances and then swing the night away! For just $15 you get a complimentary lesson followed by an evening of fun from 8:30 p.m. to 11:30 p.m. For more information visit swingingwithsimone.com

Or, hit the Parkway and head for Cape May for Vintage Dance Weekend October 10 & 11. Learn the traditional dances of the 19th century and then put your newfound expertise to good use at a costumed Vintage Ball on Saturday night or a Tea Dance Sunday afternoon! For ticketing packages and additional information visit capemaymac.org.

Sight-Seeing Calorie Burn

Take on the New Jersey Lighthouse Challenge the weekend of October 17 & 18. Visit 13 historic lighthouses/sites throughout the state. Each participating site will have its own souvenir token to commemorate the visit. You don’t have to enter the lighthouse to meet the challenge… but you should! That’s a lot of steps! Your glutes will thank you. For more information visit njlhs.org.

Walk It Out

The easiest exercise of all—just get moving. On Saturday, October 10, enjoy a 90 minute Historic Hike through from the Morris County Courthouse uphill to Fort Nonsense. The tour beings at 10 a.m.

Or, set your own pace by wandering through one of the many street fairs going on around the state. Stroll amongst the vendors… and maybe opt to walk briskly past the funnel cake stand. Visit streetfairs.org for to find a fair near you.

When the weekend rolls around and you finally find yourself with some free time be sure to spend it wisely. Make memories, spend time with friends, learn something, see something new, spend your weekends feeling great in the Garden State.

For more great ideas to fill your free time visit the NJL event calendar.

Fall For Fall

By Molly McGrath

Summertime brings “summer loving” and in spring “love is in the air.” We even have a holiday where a little man in a diaper shoots us with arrows and makes us fall in love with one another right smack in the middle of winter.

Fall is all alone. Fall gets a bad rap sometimes, stealing summer away the way it does. In my humble opinion, though, it is the greatest time of year. I have had an ongoing love affair with fall since I was a little girl. I can smell it in the air in the last weeks of summer. I can’t help but smile the first day it’s cool enough to wear jeans and a jacket. My feet jump for joy when I retire my flip-flops and pull out my socks, sneakers, and boots. I believe that there should be a celebration of love in autumn, just as there is for every other season. That celebration will start right here—it’s time to fall in love with fall.

The first reason to love fall is a no-brainer—just open your eyes. Our state isn’t called “The Garden State” by accident. Fall in New Jersey is beautiful. The changing leaves paint a picturesque backdrop to our daily lives for an entire season! Go outside and take it all in. There are plenty of parks and forests calling your name. Find one near you at the New Jersey Department of Parks & Forestry’s website, nj.gov/dep/parksandforests.

Reason #2 to fall in love with fall: Harvest activities. Apple picking, pumpkin picking-carving-or-painting, corn mazes, festivals. Who could ask for anything more? What could be better than spending the day with your family sipping apple cider and munching on donuts in a sweater and jeans? Who doesn’t love crisp, cool, sunny days? Or grab your friends and make your way through a corn maze—you may become hopelessly lost, but at least you’ll be together. Check out the Tewksbury Harvest Festival on September 26 at Christie Hoffman Farm in Califon, visit one of the many “pick your own” farms in our state, or head out to Stony Hill Farm in Chester for “Maize Quest” the biggest corn maze in the state!

Foliage and fall festivals are the obvious reasons to love autumn, but for me, there is a less recognized one too.

Fall is a great time to help others. September is Ovarian Cancer Awareness Month. Women, join the fight for yourselves and for each other. Men, join the fight for the women in your life. The Kaleidoscope of Hope Foundation will hold three walk-a-thons across the state this September. Visit kohnj.org to find out how you can get involved. Then, in October, take up the fight during Breast Cancer Awareness month. Visit cancer.org and find out how you can participate in a Making Strides Against Breast Cancer 5k.

With Labor Day behind us it’s time to face the facts: summer’s days are numbered. But the doldrums of winter are still months away! So before you let your summer lovin’ go into hibernation, try having a fling with fall.

Fit is It

By Molly McGrath

After months of rolling around on my basement floor trying hopelessly to instruct myself through myriad exercise DVDs, and hours of considering the financial magnitude of a gym membership, I had given up. Monumental registration fees and long-term contracts were the demons that scared me away from the gym and into my basement, where I stretched, crunched, lifted, flexed, squeezed…and right back upstairs for a snack. “Home-Gym” had become my own personal oxymoron. It just wasn’t working out. It’s not you “home-gym”… it’s me

So there I was, with nowhere to exercise, a fitness vagabond. It was time to face the music.

Ok, enough with the dramatic overtones. It was literally time to face the music—I signed up for Jazzercise. This is not the leg-warmer-wearing, leotard-sporting Jazzercise of the past, though, ladies. We are talking 60 minutes of fast-moving, heart-pumping, calorie-burning FUN! Combining moves from hip-hop, yoga, Pilates, jazz dance, kickboxing and resistance training, your friendly instructor will lead you through routine after routine set to tunes from yesterday and today. You can burn up to 500 calories in one session!

Don’t be nervous about joining this group fitness class alone or not knowing the dance moves: everyone is very welcoming and works at their own pace. Do your best and have a great time doing it! (And if you’re really nervous you can visit jazzercise.com and learn the moves ahead of time!)

Jazzercise is a lower-cost, high-impact, high-fun way to get fit. With classes offered multiple times a day, almost every day, it’s a perfect match for any schedule. Join an exercise community! Look great, feel great, break up with bad habits and make fit… FUN.

There are Jazzercise locations all over the state. Find one near you at jazzercise.com.

Misadventures Down The Shore

By Molly McGrath

Since I was six I have spent one week each summer in Wildwood. This year’s vacation began like any other—wake up at the crack of dawn, load the car, pile in, and head for the Garden State Parkway. Here, my misadventures began.

Misadventure #1: The philosophy of “wake up early to beat the traffic” has become a farce. By 8 a.m. the traffic was backed up just to get on the parkway and our E.T.A. of 10 a.m. was quickly pushed back to 11:30. A minor setback in the grand scheme of things, but a pain in the butt nonetheless.

Misadventure #2: Attempting to walk on the Wildwood Boardwalk between 9 a.m. and noon. One morning my mom and I decided to go for a walk. Minutes after arriving a loud “BANG!” rang out. A gun shot? A car backfiring? Oh, no. No, no. A rental-bike-tire-blowout. I kid you not. One second this man is having a great time riding his adult-size trike down the boards and then suddenly he’s swerving uncontrollably and trying to regain his balance. It could happen to anyone. It could happen to you. And if it doesn’t happen to you, you could still be the poor pedestrian who gets his foot run over. No one is exempt from rental bike misadventures between 9 a.m. and noon.

Misadventure #3: Attack of the killer salps. Ok, so they weren’t “killer” exactly, but they sure were gross. Cape May County was inundated with what seemed to be baby jellyfish—salps. The problem got worse and worse each day until they were piled as thick as slush in the winter and you could leave footprints in them. One man on the beach even suffered from salp-infested chest hair (uh, ew). And how about the thousands of mussels that washed up in Ocean City last week… sorry I missed out on that one.

These misadventures happen to us all—seagulls attacking us for our food (my own grandmother once took a wing to the back of the head and lost her sandwich in the fight), small children driving into us on their bikes, drivers from *insert-least-favorite-state-here* slowing us down… and yet we keep coming back. The traffic gets worse, the crowds get bigger, the salps attack… And yet every summer there we all are.

The Jersey Shore is an undeniably magical place. Why? Because it’s where we’ve all grown up. It’s possible to overlook the misadventures because of the things that always stay the same: the way your heart beats a little faster when you see the ocean for the first time in a year, the smell of salt and the sound of the waves crashing when you first set foot on the sand, the way the lights on the ferris wheel and the sounds of kids laughing instantly make you smile and remember that… down the shore everything’s all right.