Doing the Bix 7

(Estimated reading time: 3 minutes)

In July I joined 20,000 plus runners and walkers for the annual Bix-7 race in the Quad Cities. I live in California now, but the Quad Cities is where I grew up and where most of my family still lives.

The Quad Cities is a group of communities on the Mississippi River with Iowa on one side and Illinois on the other. There are five main cities (yes, five, not four) in the Quad Cities: Davenport, Bettendorf, Rock Island, Moline, and East Moline.

The Bix 7 race kicks off the annual Bix jazz festival that celebrates the music of Bix Biederbecke. Bix was a jazz legend from the 1920s from Davenport, Iowa who lived hard and died young.

This was the fourth time I’ve walked the Bix. The race course is seven miles with the first mile being uphill, but there’s also a two-mile option called the Quick Bix, which is what I did this year, where you go up the Brady Street hill, turn right near the Palmer College of Chiropractic, walk one block, and then head right back down the steep hill again to the afterparty.  

Just being in the race this year was a personal victory for me. I had surgery last fall on my Achilles tendon. Thinking about doing the Bix seemed impossible back in January when I was still using a walker, but just thinking about being in the race and catching up with family helped keep me motivated as my left leg relearned how to walk and how to use the stairs. I kept telling myself that my body wants to heal and I kept asking myself what could I do to help it heal.

In January I worked out how many steps on my fitness tracker I would need to cover seven miles. The plan was to gradually increase my step count each month so I would be able to handle seven miles in one go by July. I got an exercise bike and started walking around the neighborhood. I joined the local Y so I could do my physical therapy in the pool. I tried a yoga class but quit when I injured my knee trying to keep up with the class. I got back into Tai Chi, started Pilates, and used the Coach Potato to 5K app on my phone to keep me inspired.

About a month before the race, I realized I was way behind on my step count goals so I started pushing myself to walk more. About a week before the race, I woke up one morning barely able to move. I had just a few days before my flight and I wasn’t sure if I could walk from gate to gate at the airport, let alone walk seven miles or even two in a race. I massaged my ankle with a salve with CDB oil and put my feet up when I could. Luckily by race day, I was ready for the two-mile course.

The actual race wasn’t easy for me. It was hot and humid and there was still a little swelling in my left ankle. The first mile was uphill all the way and for a moment near the very top I wasn’t sure if I could make it. So I concentrated on the positives, hanging with my sister, amazed at the site of thousands of people ahead of me going up the hill, checking out the costumes some of the racers wore. We waved back at the crowd gathered to watch the race and laughed at sign in front of the fraternity that invited racers to stop by for a beer. We watched an older man doing the race with crutches and his friend who had a wheelchair on standby and wondered how it was that he was still ahead of us. Someone blasted 70’s disco music and I sang along with the crowd. Someone played Major Tom on a guitar and we sang along with that, too.

I feel like I should wrap this post up with a moral of some kind. I set a goal of walking seven miles in a race. I worked hard, but in the end, I couldn’t walk seven miles and barely finished two. But when I look at the bigger picture, all the training I did was about more than just walking the Bix. It was really about me reconnecting to family and getting healthy again. The body really does want to heal.