Some of this is rehash from another post that I made a few years ago, but it also includes a bit of earlier history of Bix and the Eastern Iowa running scene in the late 1970s. Scroll down to my race report from the race last Saturday.
After 42 years I finally returned to run a classic summer road race, the Bix 7 in Davenport, Iowa. It was a pretty sleepy event in the 1970s, a sidekick to the Bix Jazz Festival. The race grew each year after its inception, and by 1978-79 it would have several hundred entrants with some good local and regional talent. Road racing was growing fast back then, but there were no professional runners nor any prize money at these events, although it was well known that top runners would get under the table appearance money and incentives from sponsors.
The 1980 race put Bix on the map because the Olympic boycott left some runners without much to look forward to. Bix invited the King of the Roads Bill Rodgers that summer and the instantly race tripled in size, to 1,800 finishers. Over the years Rodgers and scores of elite runners returned every July and the race grew to more than 10-times that to over 20,000 and it became a mainstay on the elite professional race circuit.
But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Eastern Iowa Running Scene (and beyond) – 1970s
The Bix Biederbecke Jazz Festival started in Davenport in the early 1970s and soon after (1974) the race was added. I first heard of the race in 1978, when I was a sophomore in college. I spent the latter half of the summer training in Iowa City, where I had gone to high school. I had started running with a group of former and present University of Iowa runners. With several 4:00 to 4:05 milers in the group, they much more talented than I was (my best at the time were 4:37 for the mile and 9:57 for 2 miles) but they let me tag along a couple times a week. Former Hawkeye Gregg Newell was the social glue to keep the group going, and he mentored me some along the way as I was still pretty new to running. We did some killer workouts on the roads and golf courses around Iowa City and sometimes would go out for a beer afterward.
That summer Gregg got 2nd at Bix to John Lodwick a post-college runner who had grown up in Iowa. Lodwick had placed 8th at Boston that spring with a strong 2:14 (he later went on to run 2:10).
Gregg said he wanted some revenge. He heard that Lodwick and Jeff Wells (2nd to Rodgers at Boston in 1978) would be headlining Armstrong’s Adidas 10K in nearby Cedar Rapids in August. So Gregg got us all fired up to run as a team for Eby’s Sporting Goods, his employer and a rival to the race’s sponsor, the Cedar Rapids-based Armstrong’s Department Store. He got us singlets and we trained as a group at least three times a week.
Race day was in late August and we all ran great. Wells edged out Gregg for the win (28:13 and to 28:19) and Lodwick took 3rd in 28:32, and our Eby’s team took seven of the top ten spots, with me placing 10th in a PR 31:50 (it turns out the course was probably short by 30-40 seconds, but it was still a huge PR as I had only run 5:30 pace for 5 miles on the road the previous fall). Wells and and Lodwick were well known on the road circuit by then and Gregg was on the edge of making it to the big time.
Over the winter of 1979 I went out to Colorado for skiing and planned to stay in Boulder for the summer to train with some college teammates. However, within my first week there–just days before the inaugural Bolder Boulder–I stepped off a curb while running on the CU campus and snapped a bone in my foot. My the summer training plans were shot and I was working a restaurant job I didn’t like, so I gave Gregg a call to see if he had any openings at the new Eby’s branch he was managing in Moline, Illinois just across the Mississippi River from Davenport. He said sure.
So I hobbled up onto a Greyhound bus and headed back east. The company had paid for Gregg’s two bedroom apartment in Moline that year and he was generous enough to let me stay there for the summer.
Gregg raced most weekends and had his own unique training system, running low mileage but higher intensity, with a long run or race, and a of couple tempo runs at 5:00 pace but not much else. He had been a 3:46 1500 m runner at the University of Iowa and had been All-Big Ten a couple of times, but was injured a lot in college. His his low mileage training allowed him to excel on the roads after college (1:01 for 20K) and cross country (All-American) off of probably just 20-30 miles a week.
During the summer of 1979 Lodwick and Wells were not in the area, but Gregg had some good local competition. In July he came back for Bix and this time he won! He had gone to high school in Davenport won the state meet in the mile in 1972 (4:12) and was something of a local hero.
A few weeks later I went back to my college and after that only saw Gregg a few more times. He was always positive and encouraging.
The next summer I got into the best shape of my life training or a marathon in Wisconsin, and ran a 1:09 20K just the week before. Against my better judgement my teammate convinced me that long run the following day would be good training for our upcoming marathon (Paavo Nurmi in Hurley, Wisconsin). The run was torture, and felt a popping in my hip. Bix was just a week later but to go Bix anyway. I did not run much that week hoping my hip would get better. I hitched a ride to Davenport from Madison and stayed with Gregg. I ran the race at a tempo effort (5:40s) but the hip was only worse, so had to take some time off.
With Rodgers and several other top runners in the field Gregg did not win in 1980, but was 6th. Rodgers was a huge draw for the race, and afterward he spent more than an hour in a packed auditorium taking questions from everyday runners. From that day on Bix became a big name race, largely due to its partnership with Rodgers.
Moving On
I saw Gregg only once or twice after that visit. In the fall our cross country team had a meet in nearby Monmoth, Illinoisand we had lunch at the same mall where Gregg worked, so we stopped by the store.
He looked at me an laughed, saying “Look what the wind brought in.” He also showed up to our Division III Regional cross country meet in Rock Island in November. We maybe stayed in touch here and there with a card, but I did not return to Iowa much after college and not to the Quad Cities at all.
Later I learned that Gregg had passed away in 1989, at just 34 years old. That was very sad news, as he was very kind and giving and loved nothing more than to share his running with others.
The Quad Cities running community respected Gregg and his loss was hard on many people. Bix remembered him. They retired the bib number 5 because he had five top ten finishes at the race, and they created the Gregg Newell award given every year to the fastest runner from the Quad Cities.
The Return 2022
I had only been though the Quad cities a couple times since the 1980 but hadn’t stopped in. It all looked familiar last week, maybe more run-down due to the ensuing economic downturns (the 1980s Farm Crisis, 2008 recession, Covid). After picking my bib, we stayed in Rock Island, just mile from the start. Rock Island in particular seemed hard hit.
Race day dawned pleasant in the low 60s with high clouds, by race time the temperature had climbed to 69 degrees with a dew point of about 65–extremely good for Bix. I lined up near the front of the second corral, just behind the elites. They held us there for what seemed a long time before counting down.
I planned on pacing myself up the infamous Brady Street hill (1/3 of a mile at 9% grade), only accelerating over the top and into the second mile. I think I did that pretty well, with a 6:28 first mile split just after the first couple of turns onto Kirkwood Avenue, a wide tree-lined boulevard that winds back toward the Mississippi over the 2.5 miles.
If I made a mistake on Saturday it might have been pushing that 2nd mile too hard, as I caught my instantaneous splits at 5:50 or faster a few times (plan had been to maintain 6:00-6:10), that was 5:57. Through half way I settled and maintained about 6:20 pace, dreading the two big climbs on the return. First one after 3.5 was hard and I split 4 at 25:13, a little off from goal pace (25:00 would have been about where I would like to be), but I wasn’t thinking too much about that, because I knew the next two miles would be very challenging with a gradual (2-3%) but relentless ascent. Those splits were 6:33, and 6:34 and I dropped as many places as I had made up.
I recovered quickly once we crested at 6 miles (I heard 38:10), and tried to open it up over the fast descent and flat finish on 2nd Avenue. That was a fun stretch and I picked up a few spots to finish in 44:07 (6:18/mile). So not too far off my self-seeded 6:15, but a bit more than my higher end goal of sub 6:10.
I really enjoyed making the return to Bix 7 and hope to come back, maybe go for the age group record next year (new age group!). I also spent some time reflecting on those early days and of course the positive influence of my old friend Gregg.
rrunnin234 