Last weekend I was lucky enough to escape the Chicago winter and spend a few days in LA with Nike representing the Windy City as part of their Nike Training Club tour. It was an absolutely incredible opportunity and definitely a blogging career highlight and after spending three days with women from all over the world and being immersed in fitness, I’m feeling grateful and inspired in a way that I don’t know if I’ve ever experienced before.

There was plenty of sunshine and time at the beach and the Viceroy Hotel had the most amazing decor but the true pinnacle of the weekend was Saturday’s NTC Tour Los Angeles stop. The event featured workouts led by the very best in the fitness world, Nike’s own Master Trainers, as well as fashion and nutrition advice and even a little pampering with braid & manicure bars. I’ll be the first to admit that I was fairly nervous going into the event – we’d been given a serious 20 day training plan that I didn’t exactly do the greatest job following and had heard that we had a serious 5 hour day of workouts ahead of us. Running has made up the vast majority of my fitness over the past two years and the workouts during NTC Tour definitely pushed me outside of my comfort zone.

But at the end of the day, I did it and it was amazing. I left feeling impressed with myself for tackling four back-to-back workouts in one day and even more so for trying new things and pushing myself in new ways. It felt good to sweat and work hard and even better to fly home to Chicago on Sunday with sore muscles and a hunger to focus on fitness again and make my body a priority within the craziness of  day-to-day life.

If you’re not familiar with Nike Training Club, it’s a segment of Nike Women designed to make fitness easily accessible – they have a really great iPhone app that allows you to download workouts that each have a different focus and workout in the comfort of your own home while following the same training plans that pros and athletes use themselves. There’s also an in-person element to Nike Training Club where Nike has opened fitness studios geared toward women across the country that host free workout classes taught by their team of trainers ranging from barre and yoga to running clubs and their signature NTC class which is essentially the workouts from the app brought to life. For those of you in Chicago, be sure to stop by the Michigan Avenue NTC studio (and you absolutely do not want to miss Monday night yoga with Megan!)

Thank you to Nike for one of the coolest experiences I’ve ever had – I feel so proud to have been able to represent Chicago at NTC Tour LA and so lucky to have been able to meet the fantastic ladies from Toronto, Sweden, New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Austin. I can’t wait to channel the energy of the weekend into training for another season of races (I signed up for two more half marathons yesterday!) while trying new workouts and actually making fitness something fun for myself.

Have you ever used the Nike Training Club app or tried one of their studio classes? What’s your favorite way to workout? Any recommendations for me to balance race training this season?


I was sent to LA as a guest of Nike and attended NTC Tour on behalf of the brand – thank you for supporting the brands that help make Pretty & Fun possible. I do my best to only work with brands that I truly love and fit well with my audience, and all opinions are always 100% honest and my own.