Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} The Boy Who Runs The Odyssey of Julius Achon by Julius Achon How a boy soldier from Uganda made it to the Olympics and Nike's Oregon Project. Call it serendipity. Call it "a mystical provenance," as Portland writer John Brant does. Like so much else in Olympian Julius Achon's life, Brant's new biography of him seems to have been predestined. In 2012, Runner's World magazine, where Brant is a writer at large, published an article about Achon, whose gift for running had transported him from his war-torn village near Lira, Uganda, to a U.S. collegiate title and two Olympic Games - and who ultimately went home to establish the Achon Ugandan Children's Fund in memory of his mother, Kristina. The article included Portland businessman Jim Fee, Achon's longtime mentor, who thought Achon's story deserved to be told at book length. Seeking a writer, Fee came upon Brant's co-author credit for "14 Minutes," the story of marathoner Alberto Salazar's 2007 heart attack at Nike. Brant soon was having coffee with Fee and Achon. "It didn't take long before I fell under the spell (and) realized there was something special about Julius and Jim," Brant said. Especially Julius Achon. "There's something about this guy: He moves through life and encounters these obliterating obstacles but finds his way to deal with them in an accepting way . moving from being abducted as a boy soldier (in Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army, which terrorized Uganda for years) to becoming an Olympic runner against all odds." Brant's resulting book is titled "The Boy Who Runs: The Odyssey of Julius Achon" (Ballantine Books, 272 pages, $27). " 'Odyssey' is a term used pretty loosely . but in Julius' case, it's really true," Brant said. "He was born in a particular place and very much a man of that place, and he felt like to fulfill his destiny he was called on . to leave." Years later, "he felt pulled back, by that same sense of destiny and agency, to return to that place." Achon's odyssey brought him in 2003 to Portland, where he worked for several years at Nike's Oregon Project under Salazar, helping train Olympians Galen Rupp and Kara and Adam Goucher. "If you look at an athlete who embodies all the principles, good stuff about sports, that Nike markets and promotes, you could look at LeBron James or someone like that, but you also could look at Julius Achon," Brant said. Achon also coached high school runners, including Adrienne Demaree, a Jesuit High School standout who talked up Achon to her mother, who mentioned him to her boss: Jim Fee. Fee essentially became Achon's surrogate father, which makes "The Boy Who Runs" almost as much a Portland story as it is Achon's story, Brant said. Fee was "very committed to the community, very much a Portland guy," Brant said. The success of the Achon Uganda Children's Fund "might not have happened anywhere else but Portland in terms of foundation and finding sympathetic people." Fee died after a bicycling accident in 2013, but his legacy lives on: The fifth annual Achon Uganda Children's Fund benefit concert will be at 6 p.m. Saturday, Sept. 17, at the World Forestry Center in Portland. Achon, meanwhile, was elected in February to the Ugandan Parliament. "With all the cynicism and dark stuff and unsavory stuff going on in the Olympics, Julius' story is something different," Brant said. "It represents a breath of fresh air." Brant and Achon will appear at 7 p.m. Thursday, Aug. 25 at Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, 3415 S.W. Cedar Hills Blvd., Beaverton. Here is an excerpt from "The Boy Who Runs." One day at a time, one workout at a time, he plugged along in his pacer's role for the Oregon Project. He continued working with Galen Rupp, pulling the boy through his first sub-four-minute mile at an indoor meet in Seattle early in 2005. Dissatisfied with the talent level of his other athletes, Salazar recruited Kara and Adam Goucher, a married couple, two gifted but often-injured runners from the University of Colorado. Now Julius had three elite athletes to work with--Kara, Galen, and Adam. The Nike campus's sumptuous high-tech facilities gave the enterprise an air of mystery and complexity, but the essence of distance running remained brutally simple. The days were divided, hard ones and easy ones, days of sapping effort and days of relative ease and recovery. But for a pacer, the caddy to the performers, every day was a hard day. Galen would run 12 x 1 mile at 4:30 pace one day and rest the next. On Galen's rest day, however, Kara would go 16 x 1 mile at 5:15 pace. There was only one training partner for both runners: Julius Achon. When he just had Galen to pace, Julius could cop the occasional recovery day. Now, for Julius, there was rarely an easy day. He understood that he was a cog in a machine. The other runners, he says, displayed little curiosity about his life or background. The long tempo runs passed mostly in silence. But none of that really mattered, because in mind and spirit, Julius wasn't really there. His body might be blasting 5:20 miles along the Leif Erikson Drive or knocking out intervals around the Bo Jackson turf field on the Nike campus, but his head and heart were in Lira with his family and the orphaned children. They were what seemed real to him. If Julius could find any grace note in the situation, it lay in the fact that providence had dropped these eleven kids into his life at the same time that it had removed Kristina. Julius was grateful to Alberto Salazar and the Oregon Project runners, and didn't expect more from them than he was getting. His job was to keep running. From the book THE BOY WHO RUNS by John Brant. Copyright (c) 2016 by John Brant. Reprinted by arrangement with Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. Note to readers: if you purchase something through one of our affiliate links we may earn a commission. Disclaimer. Registration on or use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement, Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement, and Your California Privacy Rights (User Agreement updated 1/1/21. Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement updated 5/1/2021). © 2021 Advance Local Media LLC. All rights reserved (About Us). The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Advance Local. Community Rules apply to all content you upload or otherwise submit to this site. OUR TEAM. Julius Achon grew up in a small village, Awake, 40 miles northeast of Lira in northern Uganda. At age 12, he was kidnapped by the Lord’s Resistance Army , a militant coalition that rebelled against the Uganda government, and was forced to become a child soldier. Three months later, Julius escaped and returned to his village. Soon thereafter, Julius returned to school and began running. His talents landed him a scholarship in 1990 to attend school at Makerere High School in the capital city of Kampala. At age 17, having attracted the attention of several Ugandan sports officials, he was entered in the 1994 World Junior Championships in Portugal, and ran the 1,500. He won the race, wearing shoes for the first time in competition and bringing Uganda its first World Junior gold medal. His performance caught the eye of John Cook, an American track coach who brought him to George Mason University in Virginia on a scholarship. Julius went on to compete for Uganda in the 1996 and 2000 Olympic Games, both times serving as captain of the Ugandan Olympic team. While training near his village in 2003, he encountered a group of orphans and couldn’t help but take them into his home. That was the beginning of the Achon Uganda Children’s Fund. Today Julius lives in Uganda’s capital of Kampala and travels frequently to his home village of Awake, now the site of the Kristina Health Center, a rural clinic that serves hundreds of severely sick or injured patients every month. Julius was elected to Uganda’s parliament in 2017 and continues to serve today. Julius’ story was detailed in John Brant’s book The Boy Who Runs . The Boy Who Runs: The Odyssey of Julius Achon. In the tradition of Uzodinma Iweala’s Beasts of No Nation by way of Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run, this is the inspirational true story of the Ugandan boy soldier who became a world-renowned runner, then found his calling as director of a world-renowned African children’s charity. “Julius can’t remember who first saw the men. He heard no warning sounds—no dog barking or twig snapping. Until this point, events had moved too swiftly for Julius to be afraid, but now panic seized him. In another instant, he realized that his old life was finished.” Thus begins the extraordinary odyssey of Julius Achon, a journey that takes a barefoot twelve-year-old boy from a village in northern Uganda to the rebel camp of the notorious Lord’s Resistance Army, where he was made a boy soldier, and then, miraculously, to a career as one of the world’s foremost middle-distance runners.