Seems like just yesterday I was being treated to an ambulance ride to our favorite Emergency Room. If you recall, there was an “incident” after one of my long runs that left me a ummm let’s go with less than fresh (link here). Since that episode I’ve slowly been working my way back to running form. From a residuals perspective it was pretty clear that the heat stroke took at least 30 seconds off my pace and as warned more susceptible to the heat. Essentially the body would start to panic as soon as it felt the temp going up and just start sweating profusely – pretty much premature panic. Each training run I tried to get more conditioned to the weather and gradually increased the mileage eventually topping out at 9 miles, 2 miles short of the incident mileage. The reason for the continued push to get back in running form was primarily due to the fact the Bix 7 was just around the corner. No rest for the wicked and the Bix hills are nothing to take lightly. Well, race day was last Saturday and as you can tell from the fact this post exists, I survived the first real test since the escort to the hospital.
The Bix 7 isn’t usually a medal event, but thanks to it being the 40th anniversary of the race they broke out the medals. This was a nice addition to the 3oth and 35th anniversary medals already hanging on my walls. More importantly, the cool medal was enough to motivate my friend Sung to run the race with me. He has recently started to run as part of his new health kick which has provided some amazing results. If you recall he went up with us to complete the Bix@6 training run a few weeks back. The success of that effort coupled with the opportunity to get a trophy for the wall was enough to convince him to sign up for the real thing. In addition to Sung, another friend, Ryan, was also signed up to experience the mega-party. The recruiting effort is going well, Rhonda and Ron were also there to participate in their second year (hope they got their pins) – once you experience the Bix you definitely want to set plans for attending the next year – one of the funnest races in the area for sure. We were unable to meet up with Rhonda and Ron before the race but (from L to R) Ryan, Sung and I were able to take the traditional pre-race shot together.
Hit the jump to read how everything turned out
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