It depends. Which gear are you interested in?
If you don't have a whole week to spend at a Cisco training class, you might also want to check with your local Cisco office. They usually have some new equipment there to demo for customers, and to give the engineers something to play with in the lab.
You can arrange to have one of their engineers give you a "guided tour" through the features. This gets you some hands-on with it and gives them practice in presenting the product. If you're interested in testing whether a certain configuration will work, you can go over it with them and work through it as a lab exercise.
