TOWNER, N.D. -- Somewhere along life's path, I became a runner. I'm not exactly sure why, but I suppose there are worse habits that I could've picked up when I was a kid.
Running was a sport that I could do without driving to town for most of the practices. I could just lace up my shoes and run down the gravel roads and trails around our ranch.
I'd go to town for some of the speed work, and on weekends, I'd get on the bus with my track teammates for the meets around the area. I never won a 3,200-meter or 1,600-meter race that I entered, but I could usually place and get a ribbon. It felt good to push myself and then see what I'd have left for the last lap and the finish.
I kept up the habit later in life and found myself running full marathons in Chicago, New York City and Fargo, N.D. (one of these things is not like the other, as the children's preschool exercise would say). I ran plenty of 5K and 10K races, and a few half marathons, too. Like I said, it's a relatively healthy addiction, and it helps clear your head when you're out on the trails putting one foot in front of the other.
As a runner, it makes a person pay a little closer attention to the track events in the summer Olympics, and admire some of the legends of those events. Our children were given the book "Bright Path," a nice book that tells the story of Jim Thorpe, an Oklahoma Native American athlete who went to the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, Sweden, and won gold medals in the pentathlon and decathlon. It tells a nice story of humble beginnings in the Indian Territory, as they called Oklahoma, and triumphant victories across the sea with accolades given to him by kings and czars. Our kids like the story.
ADVERTISEMENT
I felt like a kid myself recently when I got to meet a living hero in the world of competitive running, Billy Mills. Like Thorpe, Mills came from humble beginnings, an Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge, S.D. He went to the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo as a first lieutenant in the Marines, and an unknown to the stage of world running when he stepped up to the starting line of the 10,000-meter race.
In an amazing upset, he surged past the two leaders in the final lap to win the gold medal. You can still watch the race on YouTube, and it's a challenge not to choke up a bit when the young Lakota Marine from Pine Ridge makes his move and the announcer shouts, "Look at Mills! Look at Mills!" as he sails across the finish line.
The man who now makes his home in California still comes back to the Dakotas, and that's where I got to shake his hand, right there at the United Tribes Pow Wow by Bismarck, N.D.
I'm not the biggest follower of sports, and like many, I feel like the word hero is used pretty loosely when it comes to some of the highly paid athletes of today. But there are some good ones out there who set a good example for the next generation. The 76-year-old gold medal Olympian who shook my hand in Bismarck, who still takes the time to speak to Native American youth across the country about embracing their cultural and spiritual roots as they pursue educational and entrepreneurial goals, is one of them.
And 50 years after the world heard "Look at Mills!" broadcast from Tokyo, another generation gets the chance to "listen to Mills" in places like Bismarck about the lessons of a Lakota runner. This Norwegian nonmedalling runner can appreciate the lessons, because as the Lakota say, "mitakuye oyasin," we are all related.
