One of our long standing Experience Triathlon traditions has been our annual road trip and season opening team triathlon to Memphis in May.  Last year at Memphis they announced a move of the race to Mississippi.  We decided on the way home that we’d take this opportunity to check out a much closer and very popular race that is always held on the same weekend as Memphis, The Galena Triathlon.

This past weekend, Team ET was out in force at Galena!  Our cool black uniforms with the ET yellow dot were everywhere, and, as usual, we were having a blast.  The crew flew through the 660 yard swim and transition 1, they worked the bike up all the hills and tucked for high speed on the downs.  Then they ripped up the 4.3 mile run course as the light rain fell to cool them off.

Galena is an amazingly beautiful part of Illinois.  The countryside is heavy rolling terrain (i.e. HILLS!) and the bike and run course were very challenging.  One of the unique features of this race is the point-to-point 16.8 mile bike course which then requires two different transition areas many miles apart.  This provided some interesting and challenging pre-race and race day logistics.  To help all our racers and spectators, we developed a great “Galena Tips” document with the help of past Galena racers Mark, Sue and Jim L.  This made things much smoother and less stressful for all.  We’ll continue to enhance the document each year.

We had a fantastic cheer crew at both the race start and 17 miles away at the bike and run finish areas.  They were screamin’ and taking photos and the racers were lovin’ it!  Click here to enjoy all the photos from the weekend.

Congrats again to all the racers and thanks again for all the excellent support provided by our wonderful cheer crew.

Join us next year at this great race venue as we continue our new ET team tradition – The Galena Triathlon!!