Bill Sullivan: Winning can be overrated
I had a first-hand look at downtown Youngstown on Sunday while competing in the Peace Race’s 2-mile event and I was left in awe at its renaissance. At one time thought to be dead, the city is showing sure signs of life throughout.
It’s a feeling I well understand.
A stroke last December left me hospitalized for three months and gave me plenty of time to curse the wheelchair I was confined to.
It had been 40 years since I had last run any race. I had gained 50 pounds since and I was trying to survive my fifth stroke. (Yes, my fifth).
I was going to walk again, to compete again, to find my way back, just like the downtown.
We all need a reason to enter a footrace.
I guess I found some of my motivation back on a snowy February morning while looking out of a lonely window sitting in my wheelchair as a resident in a local assisted-living center.
I knew then I had to do the Peace Race, even if I was unable to walk at the time. It would be a goal to work toward.
“Whether you think you can or think you can’t, you’re right,” Henry Ford said.
Nearly a dozen friends and family walked with me as a support team and another 10 cheered from the crowd.
We went the length of Commerce Street which seemed nearly as long as the Nile River and almost as foreboding.
The running leaders lapped us before we turned toward Front Street and I thought in all their haste they were missing the signs of the city’s rebirth.
In the 1970s I worked in the Mahoning County Court House. Sunday I walked slowly on a curious course along Front Street, right past her.
I believe lawyers can hammer out a reasonable political compromise in that courthouse quicker than I can walk along her length.
Still, it was good seeing that old friend.
My mother suffered from polio as a girl and spent much of her life in a wheelchair.
She loved to take her kids to shop in the downtown before her death in the 1960s. She was 42. Now I was walking down those same streets with my three siblings.
In a quick glance into a plate-glass window of a familiar storefront, I swore I saw her smiling in approval as we celebrated the city she loved so much and for our walking for peace among men.
As we reached the 1-mile point I realized my gait had become comical. I was Groucho Marx walking down a gravel driveway on stilts. While inebriated.
I had time to think of the irony of the title — the Peace Race.
When our newspaper headlines read, “Obama orders airstrikes in Syria” and “Ukraine under siege” and “Israel bombs Gaza,” how can we achieve peace with a simple footrace so far away?
Where is Mahatma Gandhi when we really need him?
Thirty minutes into the race, most runners had completed the course; we were just starting our second mile.
By now it seemed we had been at this race as long as the gestation period of a silver-back gorilla.
Late in our event I spotted the finish line now nearly abandoned except for my own rooters. I made it.
Soon several runners, some international, from the longer 10K race, would come sprinting home.
I knew then that if we could overcome this hurdle — coming together to run for a more peaceful world — that there was still hope.
Hope that the next great extinction on Earth just may not come because of our foolish actions.
No, I didn’t win anything. But I did remember the Irish proverb my wise grandmother told me about 50 years ago.
My sixth-grade class tried to win some small prize in a citywide competition. We failed and I was devastated.
Grandma told me that sometimes winning is overrated. She said, “The second mouse gets the cheese.”
The second mouse was the survivor. And so is our remarkable city. And so am I.
Bill Sullivan wrote sports for The Vindicator for three decades before retiring in December. Write him at sports@vindy.com