Figured I’d be nice and give you a little break from the Henderson shoot (trust me, we have a ways still to go with those). But today, I hit the road for the first run in a long week. Why the long layoff you ask? Good question which is best answered with a visual.
I always take a week off from the annual running of the Bix 7 up in Davenport IA and this year was no exception! Usually the last post of July is earmarked for a recap of the results, but in what has become a rare occurrence my quota was met early last month. No worries, time is an unstoppable entity and August will do just fine.
Before the gun ever went off this year I was part of a record. A record that has stood for 38 straight runnings of the Bix race. Cursed by every Globull Warming pundit, this year was the COLDEST in the history of the race. Take a guess at what the temperature was when I entered the staging area…keep in mind this is the last Saturday in July in the Midwest. If you said 58 then you are right (and a damn good Google user). Linda and I were talking through chattering teeth all the way from the car. Linda had already opted for her new running coat (admittedly pretty cool seeing as how the sleeves attach by magnets) and somehow convinced me to go back and grab my running rain/wind breaker. Oh yeah, I remember how – she offered to carry it for me during the race (big thanks for that by the way!). This allowed me to save some tooth enamel on the trek to our secret pre-race bathrooms. By the way, I was reading last year’s Bix recap and noticed that a) I was definitely not feeling the best before that race and b) Linda was even complaining about the cold last year – not sure what that was off the top of my head, but you already know it was colder this year. I was feeling significantly better than last year, but truthfully not at 100% – felt like a cold or something was trying to dampen the day, but nothing really came out of that so guessing it was just some pre-race butterflies. Note, to address getting sick at work like last year, we opted for a vacation the week before. We’ll save the details for that vacation for another post, but the week before that it was over 100 for heat index – that somehow turned into a rainy 61 when we arrived at our destination spot at the Dells.
Expecting another hot one, I went ahead and took a 7 mile training run in the morning before we left for the Dells. Heat index was pretty wicked, but made it through so felt comfortable there wouldn’t be any issues finishing the race. We returned that Wednesday allowing me to catch a cooler (75 degree) final ~6 mile tapper down. That went excellent with split times coming in ahead of plan. I remember noting in the post race summary notes that I was ready for the Bix!
Hit the jump to see how the race turned out .. and read about some of our friends that also made the trek to Davenport this year
