Bill Rodgers is set to run his 43rd Quad-City Times Bix 7
In 1978, Bill Rodgers entered 30 road races and amazingly, astonishingly, he won 27 of them.
Over the course of his running career, he won 22 marathons, all during a thoroughly incredible 10-year period from 1974 to 1983.
He doesn’t win anything anymore, not even in his age group, but the 75-year-old Boston resident is still running, and he will be coming back to run the Quad-City Times Bix 7 for the 43rd time on July 29.
Rodgers said he thought he had done the Falmouth Road Race on Cape Cod about 35 times and the Cherry Blossom 10-miler in Washington, D.C., perhaps 30 times.
He never has entered any race as frequently as he has the Quad-City Times Bix 7, which is holding its 49th event this year.
“And the Bix is probably the most challenging of them all,’’ Rodgers said. “But it’s a race I remember so well from that first time in 1980. I was still young and I could duke it out and I could race. Now I just try to hang on.’’
A man who once logged hundreds of miles in training each week now jogs 25 to 30 miles a week. He has done about 10 races this year, including Cherry Blossom. He said he now just went back to some of the old events he did during his heyday.
“But I’m back in the pack,’’ he said. “I’m way back in the pack because I’m 75 years old. It’s like a whole different thing. My strength used to be that I was a marathoner and I could do high mileage. I was a high-mileage runner. I wasn’t as quick as some runners, but I could do the mileage.’’
Not anymore. During the COVID-19 pandemic, Rodgers had a chance to sift through almost 50 years of running logs and he calculated that he has done more than 1,500 races and run at least 190,000 miles in his lifetime.
Most automobiles don’t last that long. And Rodgers hasn’t had the benefit of having a change of tires or periodic oil changes.
His body is feeling the effects of all that mileage. When he enters races now, he frequently finds himself trailing runners of a similar age who have fewer miles on their personal odometers.
“What I’m seeing is I see a lot of these runners who are in their 60s and 70s and they’re all ahead of me, but they just started running pretty recently or something,’’ he said.
He steps up to a new age group this year but doesn’t figure on being a contender to win it. The Quad-City Times Bix 7 course record for men ages 75-79 is 54 minutes, 58 seconds. Rodgers’ finishing time a year ago was 1:08:43.
Despite that, he still enjoys running.
“Now when I do 30 miles a week, I feel like when I was doing 100 miles a week,’’ he said. “I feel good, relatively speaking. No complaints with regards to running. I think it’s a great way to live.’’
Rodgers won the Quad-City Times Bix 7 the first two times he came here, in 1980 and 1981, and finished in the top 10 on seven occasions.
However, he is remembered almost as much for other years.
In 1995, he paused as he was coming down Kirkwood Boulevard to catch women’s leader Olga Appell just as she collapsed from heat exhaustion. He made sure that Appell received medical attention before jumping back into the race.
posted Friday July 14th