I’m back with part 2 of my Reebok adventures! If you missed part 1, check that out first. I share my first experience with CrossFit!
After our workout, we headed back in to the main Reebok headquarters.
Back inside, we settled in for a little info session about some of Reebok’s products. I loved the table decorations. 😉
In addition to learning more about their current shoes, we got a sneak peak of some of their upcoming summer and fall lines and let me tell you — they are awesome. In addition to the RealFlex Transition shoes we wore throughout the day for our workouts (and I wore to travel all week — SO comfy), we were also given a pair of their ZigNano Fly II shoes, which are part of their running line.
Aren’t they cute? I love the colors and the fun squiggly bottom — they have a minimalist type lower profile construction but with a supportive frame, and are very lightweight, flexible, and soft. I’m really excited to try them out and will report back soon with my thoughts.
After the product session, it was lunch time! They had a great spread for us — lots of healthy options, which I appreciated.
I ended up with a big salad with all sorts of veggies plus a little roast beef, and a turkey sandwich on delicious hearty bread. Hit the spot!
After lunch, we headed to another area of the Reebok Headquarters to learn about how their shoes are created! We first met with Bill McInnis, who is head of Reebok Advanced Innovations — he literally used to be a rocket scientist (he worked for NASA previously) so I’m pretty confident in his shoe designing abilities. 😉
He gave a really cool presentation showing all the different iterations it takes one line of shoes before they become the shoes that we see in stores. They have groups of testers that try the shoes for a certain amount of time, give feedback, and then they change the shoes and do it all over again until the majority of people are happy, both with the short term AND long term performance of the shoes. Quite the process!
We also saw some of their cool software for designing shoes.
And got a chance to see their 3D printer in action — with 3D printing, you literally make 3D solid objects from a digital file by printing successive layers of very thin material over and over again until a shape eventually starts to form! Apparently the technology was developed by MIT — no surprise there. The copy of the guy’s head in the photo below was created by the printer — how cool is that?! It was SO realistic!
We also learned about Reebok’s new “U-Form” technology, which is a heat activated custom-fit technology built into the lining of some of their newer shoes. With U-Form, consumers use a hair dryer to heat their shoes for two minutes, which causes the shoes to soften; you then put on the shoes and wait a few minutes for them to harden perfectly molded to your feet! Cool, huh?
After our educational sessions, it was time for another workout! This time we did a cardio dance workout led by Ilyse Baker, who flew in from California just to teach the class. She’s got some serious moves — no surprise, since she’s worked with Rihanna, Access Hollywood, and a ton of other celebs/big media outlets.
I’m not usually into dance workouts because I don’t like having to think and remember sequences when I work out, so I wasn’t expecting to like this class, but Ilyse is a pro and did an awesome job making it fun for us. Great music, too! We were ready for the club. 😉
I was surprisingly sweaty afterward, too! Here we are breaking it down:
And you can also check out this video, courtesy of Bex, of us dancing! You can’t see me in the video, which is probably for the best. 😉
But you CAN see me in this cool video that Kelly took of us all during the CrossFit workout earlier in the day! Right at the beginning you can see me and Tina busting out some pull ups with our backs to the camera. See us? 🙂 Until the video zooms out you can’t tell we’re using bands to assist us with the pull-ups — we just look hardcore. 😉
This video of us all doing the 200m run portion of the CrossFit workout is fun, too! What a blast. 🙂 You can see me running in the second group!
I left for the airport on Friday exhausted but happy. What a wonderful day — thank you again to Reebok and FitFluential for this great opportunity!
