How I spent my summer

Maybe I'm a little late on this. I wrote it over a week ago but I've been slow to post it! The week of Labor Day kind of counts as the end of summer, right?

In the spring I returned to Big City just in time to (belatedly) celebrate our 2nd anniversary. As a belated birthday gift to me, we took a 4-day road trip in May that let us explore some new areas. I spent a few days visiting friend and collaborator Theo analyzing data for my conference presentation. In July we did a lot of traveling. We spent a week at the beach with my family, went to a wedding for our friends whose cats we had for a year, then spent a week with Jon's family on a tranquil lake. Our dog learned how to swim and we learned she's still clumsy (and adorable).

Shortly after returning home from Ukenzagapia in the spring, I decided that I was going to do a triathlon this summer. I found an all-women one nearby and started training. I had signed up for an indoor triathlon more than 2 years ago, but that ended up being the weekend of my grandmother and sister's funerals, so that didn't happen. I don't particularly love running, I'm not a very good swimmer, and I'm not a very fast cyclist, but I liked that the training was varied so I didn't get bored. I also did some yoga. I didn't stick to my training program exactly, and I felt like I should have done more, but the triathlon was actually easier than I thought it would be. It was just a sprint distance tri, which means the distances are all reasonable. I was thrilled with my performance (easily top 50%) and I definitely want to do more triathlons. I felt great going into the run, and really surprised myself at how fast I ran.

When we weren't traveling, I spent my days at the office working on data analysis for the conference and writing. Then most the last week after the conference was spent getting ready for this last trip to Ukenzagapia! So that's how I spent my summer. Goodbye, summer. See you next year!