By Mike Wise, Published: October 29

The ritual is the same every Saturday before the Marine Corps Marathon. First, the runners and their families, a group numbering about 50, shuffle into a conference room. They mingle, pick up their long-sleeve T-shirts, munch on cold-cut sandwiches and cookies, and wait for the video projection machine to play.

There, in grainy black-and-white celluloid, they see the young Marine, the first lieutenant in his “U.S.A.” tank top, taking the lead on the gun lap of the 10,000-meter Olympic final in Tokyo.

They let out a small gasp when he is bumped, nudged to the outside by the world-record holder from Australia. They groan when he drops to third and then fourth behind the Tunisian, just as the runners are about to round the backstretch.

And at that jarring moment when Billy Mills re-enters the camera frame, now high-stepping the last 100 or so meters as he sprints past the Olympic favorites and the defending champion — never having won a major race before, his time in the preliminaries almost a minute slower than the favorite — the room thunderously applauds, as if everyone were watching a live sporting event.

During the replay, they laugh at the sound of the stunned NBC analyst Dick Bank, shouting, “Look at Mills! Look at Mills! Oh my God!” — now a YouTube favorite. And they applaud again at the final image, of the only American to ever win Olympic gold in the event, who puts his hands on his head in utter disbelief over what he has done.

They clap again, in 2011 — for the man in the footage from 1964.

Serene, regal, a full head of brownish hair to help him pass for barely 50, he walks to the front of the room. Billy Mills, 73 and three Octobers away from the 50th anniversary of his victory, tells them who they are running for Sunday and why.

“Who did you beat?” someone says.

You want to raise your hand, blurt out “Ron Clarke and Mohammed Gammoudi.” But Billy’s answer is always better.

“Who did I beat?” he replies. “I beat the demons within me.”

Even the people in the room who have heard his story for seven years now — since 2004, when Mills’s Running Strong for American Indian Youth charity began using the Marine Corps Marathon as its major annual fundraiser — become quiet, instantly enraptured.

“The greatest challenge we face is perception,” he says.

When his mother had died of tuberculosis and diabetes at the age of 43 on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota, the perception was of sadness, self-pity and anger. He was just a boy of 9 — his entire identity formed by the Oglala Lakota Sioux on the Res.

That’s when his father said, “Son, you have broken wings.” He proceeded to draw a circle around Billy in the Pine Ridge dirt. “He told me to step inside and close my eyes.”

“He said, ‘If you follow what I share with you now, some day you may have wings of an eagle. Look inside your heart, mind body and spirit. You will see anger and hate, the emotions that will destroy you.

“He told me to look deeper where the dreams lie. And he said, ‘Find your dream, son. It’s the pursuit of the dream that’ll heal you.’ ”