Event: Wanderlust Yoga in the City New York

Despite (or perhaps due to) the fact that this is a holiday week, I’ve been under a lot of stress. My travel plan isn’t my usual, work is compressed into four days instead of five, my house closing got pushed back indefinitely, and even my body isn’t cooperating – my IT band and knee are still acting up from the Ogden Marathon last weekend. On Monday, I went to a hot yoga class while visiting my parents in Albany, NY, and that helped a lot – but I definitely need more yoga to help my muscles really feel better.

Luckily, I was invited to attend a really awesome (and free) yoga event in NYC next weekend. Whether or not my knee/IT band are better by then, I think some stretching would be great… and I’m hoping some of you can join me!

Wanderlust Festival’s Yoga In The City New York is teaming up with Sweet Riot (a Fair Trade chocolate company) for a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory-inspired giveaway. Yoga in the City New York will take place on June 9th at Pier 63 and will include appearances by Schuyler Grant, Dana Flynn, Kelly Morris, Twee Merrigan, Raghunath, David Romanelli and Dana Slamp, hosted by Kristin McGee. In addition to getting to take cool yoga classes and watch some amazing demonstrations, Sweet Riot will also pass out chocolate bars to the first 500 attendees at Yoga In The City, one of which will have a golden ticket to attend Wanderlust Vermont from June 20-23. Having just come back from a great trip to Vermont, it sounds like a healthy and totally relaxing prize, and I’d love to go!

Thanks to the partnership with Sweet Riot, I received a yummy six-pack of chocolate bars in the mail – and I brought them to Dallas with me this week. While I can try to blame it on the fact that I’m eager to see if I received a golden ticket (there is a second one somewhere in the packs sent to bloggers), the truth is that chocolate is awesome for stress-eating 🙂 I am really in love with the 70% dark chocolate + flax seeds version, which satisfies my sweet tooth while also providing some fiber that makes me less hungry. Usually sugary snacks just make me hungrier, so it’s nice to get the flax in there to make me conscious of just how much I’m snacking.

But back to yoga! (Yes, I’d better get back to some form of exercise after eating all that candy.) The Yoga in the City New York event runs from 1pm-6pm, and as long as it’s nice weather, I’m planning to stay the whole time. I’d love to meet some of you there! To facilitate the meetup process, I thought it would be great if we coordinated using Social Pace. Social Pace is a cool new social networking startup that lets you share what races/events you’re doing and see who else is signed up – plus see your friends’ schedules. For someone like me who is traveling all the time, it’s an awesome way to coordinate and make sure I’m not missing chances for meetups. You can sign up quickly using your Facebook account, and once registration is complete, just go to the Social Pace page and click the “I’m in” button. All of the event details are on the page (which makes it easy to know where to go), and the bottom has a conversation feature that we can use to coordinate arrival times and meeting spots.

I hope you can make it to the event with me, and I also hope that we’re all a little less stressed by the time June 9 rolls around. But if not, hey – yoga, chocolate, and friends are a great cure for anything!

What: Yoga in the City New York
Where: Pier 63 / Hudson River Park (by 23rd Street/Chelsea Piers, New York)
When: Sunday June 9, 1pm-6pm
Cost: Free! (But signup is required at the Wanderlust Yoga in the City site.)