your weekly nyc fitness and wellness guide: august 17 - 23
A free pair of Sauconys for a lucky subscriber, organized trail runs, a social bike ride, and a firsthand account of a failed activation from a new fitness dating app.
Hope everyone had a great weekend. Maddie and I just got back from a lovely day trip down to Maryland, where we grew up, for a crab feast for our dad’s birthday. Only those who are from the area will understand the nostalgia of spreading newspaper on a table, dumping a bushel of crabs on it, and picking them apart until Old Bay is in every tiny wrinkle on your skin. It’s a source of pride to outlast other people at the table.
Some fun news this week:
We’re giving one subscriber a pair of the new Saucony Paramount Max.
I’ve been living in this new pillowy, max cushion running shoe for nearly all my runs, so we were stoked when Saucony asked us if we wanted to partner to give away a pair to one person in our Rundown NYC family. We think you’ll love them: They have a fun 2000s sneaker look that we haven’t seen in a performance shoe before, and they’re also very soft yet decently speedy. Great for easy runs.
You’ll have to fill out the Google form to enter. Want an extra entry? Send it to a friend. If they subscribe + enter, have them put your name in the referral field.
*Must be subscribed to win. Love you. We’ll email the winner on Thursday AM!
This week: Organized trail runs, a free boxing class, and a firsthand account of a failed activation from a new fitness dating app.
on the radar: this week’s fitness and wellness events
Tuesday August 18: Usal NYC Run Crew Trail Run (Prospect Park), 7PM, free
The third Tuesday of every month (aka this Tuesday), cool kid group Usal hosts a 4.5-mile trail run winding through Prospect Park’s forests and along the lake. I’ve somehow never figured out how to string together that many miles of actual trail in Prospect Park, so even if I can’t make it, I’ll be stealing their Strava route.
Tuesday August 18: Soft Bar x Crunch Chisel + Happy Hour (Chelsea), 6PM, free
Soft Bar has been showing up in so many fitness collabs lately, and next up is Crunch. I just visited the Chelsea location this week for a leg day and to check out their recovery room, and it’s a very nice gym with high ceilings for the neighborhood! After a special 40-minute workout, there will be an NA happy hour from the team at Soft Bar.
Thursday August 20: Mind Reset Yoga Class (Williamsburg), 6PM, free
A beginner-friendly yoga class set to a bossa nova soundtrack, with Caipirinhas post-sweat? Ok cool! It’ll be at Mother HQ in Brooklyn, and based on their retrofuturistic IG aesthetic, I’m itching to see what the space looks like.
Saturday August 22: Hike Clerb Staten Island Kayaking with Merrell (Staten Island), 10AM, free
Usually we don’t include sold out events, but it may be worth joining the waitlist for this free kayaking excursion from Hike Clerb and shoe brand Merrell (who is actually walking the walk in terms of outdoor inclusivity more than any other brand, IMO).
Saturday August 22: Walk The Length of Manhattan (Manhattan), 10AM, free
The other day a girl asked me who on earth would spend their time browsing Partiful. (She didn’t know I write this newsletter.) But gotta say, there are some weird and wonderful events on there, like this invite to walk the length of Manhattan, which has over 1300 RSVPs. It’s hosted by Comet Sports Club, the team that hosted the childhood nightmare-inducing pacer test in Central Park a few weekends ago.
Saturday August 22: Dirt City Brooklyn Connector (Brooklyn), 730AM, $20
Prospect Park gets all the attention, but Brooklyn has way more trail than people realize. Miler Running’s Dirt City series is hosting long runs (three different length options), and the longest takes you from Fort Greene, down to Prospect Park, over to Highland Park, through the trails at Forest Park, and ends at a brewery in Ridgewood. There will be aid stations, and the registration fee is donated to Natural Areas Conservancy, a local environmental nonprofit that champions urban natural areas in New York City.
Sunday August 23: Sunday Social Bike Ride (Queens), 9AM, free
Le Tour de Queens is hosting a 19-mile social bike ride that takes you across three boroughs with a chill crew. It’s open to all bikes and all experience levels, so it’s a great opportunity for people who want to get more confident with city cycling.
Sunday August 23: Ice Cold Club Yoga to Plunge (Williamsburg), 10AM, $30
A rooftop vinyasa flow followed by a guided cold plunge sounds like a good way to spend a Sunday morning. Cold plunge guide Lauren Schramm has such great energy that she could possibly get me to take a dunk, even though its my worst nightmare.
Sunday August 23: Sunday Boxing Club (Hudson River Park), 10AM, free
Boxing was my first true fitness love (I did it for 6 years but just can’t seem to find a gym close enough to me that I like here….open to suggestions), and I always recommend it for anyone who wants to get some cardio while learning a valuable skill. It’s fun and totally engrossing! But boxing gyms can also be intimidating (if not off-putting) energy, so this park class with Sunday Boxing Club/Candace Alai seems like a great intro.
dating on the west side highway
NYC is full of fit, hot people, but there may be no denser concentration of them than the West Side Highway. (Debatable, but so says the general consensus.)
Last Wednesday, in the name of research, I forced one of my besties to download a dating app and dragged her to the West Side Highway in search of those fit, hot single men and women.
The app hosting the “event” was Leg Day, a new fitness dating app (not to be confused with Daniel Varghese’s stellar Substack of the same name.) The premise of the app is to eliminate the internal debate over whether it’s acceptable to hit on your gym crush. You can see who else is checked in at the gym, swipe on them, and, if you match, get the green light to turn your weeks of attempted eye contact into an actual conversation.
For now, it’s only live at a handful of Equinox locations and one Life Time, but on Wednesday, they were testing it out in the wild. More than 2,000 people RSVPed to a somewhat vague Partiful that had simple instructions: Show up, walk/run the West Side Highway, and use the app to find other single people doing the same thing.
Apparently, Leg Day was not prepared for all 2,000 people. Before we arrived, the app crashed. “That was a total failure,” another attendee told me later that night.
My friend and I settled onto the lawn at Little Island to people-watch and wait for signs of life when a text came through: “APP SHOULD BE WORKING!!!!” We pulled up our phones and a grid of potential dates appeared. Mine was not exactly overflowing, possibly thanks to my age settings. (The crowd skewed young—around 25, if I had to guess, and my preferences were set to minimum 29.)
At 7PM, the organizers sent out another text blast: “So the app broke. Luckily we have Judy Z’s rented out of the next 3 hours. Go there and meet everybody who came.” Off to Judy Z’s we went.
By the time we pulled up, the line stretched down the block. People looked confused and slightly nervous; a few groups had already started mingling on the sidewalk. I wasn’t surprised to see that Leg Day drew a very young, very tech-bro crowd. (It was also the case at event by Hyrox-affiliated dating app Surf, too, and singles-specific Lunge Run Club.) If you want a more mature yet still fun scene, check out ATEAM.
Two guys in unintentionally oversized blazers who looked like they were straight out of business school—the founders— came outside to do crowd control, assuring everyone that “the line is moving fast” and, more importantly, that the first round was on them.
Once inside, we struggled to move in the dimly-lit room (in a dingy way, not a sexy way). One guy stood in the center with his backpack strapped tight, eyes wide, looking down at his phone and then up at girls to match who he was seeing in the app to real life. There was some flirting happening around us, but maybe not more than you’d expect at a young, horny West Village bar on an average night.
Soon, the $1,000 open-bar tab ran out, and people started leaving once they realized they weren’t getting their promised first round. Hopefully, the app will fare better in the gym, and at least the team can joke about it.
happenings around town
Summer Streets comes to Brooklyn and the Bronx this Saturday. Eastern Parkway will be closed to cars for 2.5 miles from Grand Army Plaza to Buffalo Ave in Crown Heights. In the Bronx, you can run/walk/bike Grand Concourse between East Tremont Avenue and Mosholu Parkway.
Bed-Stuy Stoop had a great write-up this past week about the car crash that destroyed Noir Yoga’s soon-to-be-open new studio space. The team had just finished renovations the week of the crash, and will now have to rebuild once approved by the Department of Buildings. Stoked to hear it will have a garden area for outdoor classes.
Don’t be surprised if you continue to see the ancient practice of Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) show up everywhere. Last year, ear seeding had a moment (including at Remedy Place), and now wellness center 113 Spring has energy mapping sessions at their Qi Bar, and Service95 just published a piece about Shanghai’s “punk wellness” TCM scene. As The Cut covered back in February, all this newfound cool-factor comes with a predictable downside: people with little connection to—or understanding of—the tradition are bound to start repackaging it for the wellness crowd.
The Center for Archaic Networks is starting a series of week-long, tech-free residencies (yes, that means no WiFi, no phone, no computer) upstate this winter. Prices are pretty affordable right now ($400/week), and residents can choose how they want to spend their time, whether that be on the typewriter, learning an instrument, joining a work session, or in conversation with one of the three others staying at the same time.
Urban Iron—the hybrid, unsanctioned race where you run 8 miles, stopping at three gyms to workout along the way—just announced they’re expanding to LA after success in NYC, Chicago, and Austin. The NYC race will be September 13th, and you can still sign-up.
See you next Monday.