The Bix 7 2016

This past Saturday I ran the 42nd annual Bix 7 road race in the quad cities. The best part about this race was getting to run with my wife, Erin. With full time jobs and 2 young children at home, it is rare that we get the opportunity to run together, but thanks to my father-in-law watching the girls, we were able to run together on Saturday.

Erin and I ready to run

Since the Bix falls at the end of July each year, it is typically hot and humid, but we lucked out with cool temps and cloud cover for nearly the whole race (although the humidity was still high). Although this was not a "major" race on my schedule this year, and I didn't directly train for it, it ended up being a fantastic race. Both Erin and I ran lights out (although she is still a bit faster then me and could have pulled away if she wanted to), but that wasn't even the best part. This is the first race that I have run over the past 3 years that I finished and felt great afterwords. Usually I finish a race and don't want to even think about moving or running for a couple of days afterwords. After the Bix this year, I walked with my girls to the park to play and even got up at 5:30 on Sunday morning for a 3 mile recovery run.

So now for a little about the race. The Bix is known for a couple of grueling hills, especially the Brady Street hill to start the race. Both Erin and I agreed that running together this year made the hills seem shorter and easier. We ran the race together the whole way (well almost...Erin will tell you that I sprinted away from her at the end, but at least I waited until under 1/8th of a mile to go) and I really enjoyed having Erin's company. This was the first race that I have completed Ipod/music free, which is a big deal for me, and I hardly even noticed the difference. My official time was 1:11:48, beating my previous best time of 1:43:46 (set in 2006) by over 30 minutes!

Garmin snapshot of the race

The even better surprise came at home when I uploaded my run to Garmin Connect. It turns out that I set a new PR for the 1K, 1 Mile, and 10K distances!

New PRs waiting to be confirmed

Erin, Mary (mother-in-law), Lisa (aunt-in-law) and I after the race