Second Tri

After a great week in Cleveland, we headed straight to Gallup after landing in Phoenix for the 2010 Gallup Triathlon. Julie and I did this one last year and it was a such a fun relaxed event close to home - and a short manageable sprint-length distance, so Ryan as well as several other Chinle people participated too!
It started with a 375 yard swim in a swimming pool, with staggered start times based on personal estimates. Mine put me 5th in the water, and I was pretty excited to finish with the fastest female swim time for the day! Ryan also impressed in the water, his most dreaded leg of the event with a time nearly a whole minute faster than he'd estimated. The 20k (12.6 mi) hilly bike course was Ryan's strong suit, where he made up and surpassed my time. Lastly, we ran a 5k run course that included a big hill where I suffered a bit!

Thanks to CJ & Maurie for the group picture of the Tsaile/Chinle contigent

We were all pretty happy with the overall results - Julie and I both took off several minutes each from last year's times, and Ryan was especially happy with his top 10 bike time. Below you can see a snippet of the category results: Julie got 1st in her age group again, I got 2nd in my age group, Ryan was just shy of placing with 4th place!

The travel, long plane ride, long drive and short night followed by hard effort for the event was tough on the body - I came home and went straight to bed with a bad head cold that's had me in a haze all week. Finally getting back to normal and ready to get back out in the garden and looking forward to the rest of swim lessons which keep me busy this time of year.

This weekend, Ryan headed off to race in the 24 Hours in the Enchanted Forest, an endurance mountain bike ride where he joined 3 teammates to see how many laps they could get in.
I got to check out a big event for the Tsaile community - it's Annual Sheep is Life Celebration at Diné College just a jaunt from our back yard, and spent quite a bit of time in the yard. I finally got some more stuff planted, and had some fun watching the chickens on a Sunday outing - i let them out of their fenced area for some supervised time in the garden. I was impressed with the ladies' bug hunting skills and their restraint from eating the established vegetables.

More on Cleveland when I get the camera back from Ryan to download the pictures.