Ulysses Elijah paused at the bedroom doorway; the man inside lay asleep in bed. It was 8 p.m. on New Year’s Eve, 1990.

He crept across the threshold and silently searched in darkness for something of value. Elsewhere — in homes where crackling logs burned in fireplaces and televisions broadcast Dick Clark’s Times Square countdown — families and friends gathered to usher in January with high hopes for a new year.

But for Ulysses, 34, there were no hopes, or friends, or fireplace light. Inside the darkened sixth story apartment on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, he stepped into the stranger’s cold, empty living room. If he could find money in the sleeping man’s wallet or something he could pawn — small enough to carry back down the six flights he’d scaled porch-by-porch to gain entry — then he could afford cocaine. He’d kiss his lips tight around a clear glass pipe and light a ball all his own to drop on the New Year.

Empty handed, he turned to leave through the same glass patio door from which he’d entered. On his way out, he glanced back at the sleeping man and the hair stood up on the back of his neck. The man was awake, sitting up in bed. Silent and unblinking, he watched Ulysses, whose heart pounded with fear. Suspended in that moment, they locked eyes just before Ulysses slunk quietly out the patio door.

Why didn’t he do nothing? Ulysses thought, as he put his right leg over the sixth-floor railing.

His mind flashed back to another evening, another break-in. He’d entered a Waynesboro trailer, rummaged the living areas and walked to the bedroom door, opening it to find a man seated on the bed, hurriedly loading his rifle. Then too, Ulysses turned and ran. The bullets hissed past his muscular frame, tiny steel missiles whispering as they sailed overhead.

The memory stood in contrast to his present moment, in the sixth floor apartment. This victim didn’t shoot. He didn’t move a muscle, not at the first sight of a prowler in his home, nor when Ulysses absentmindedly caught his left shoe on the railing, his hands flailing for something to grab hold of and finding only air.

The body reaches a speed of nearly 40 miles per hour from a height of six stories. Had the ground below been dirt, Ulysses’ body would have made an impression four inches deep at impact. But the surface was concrete. Ulysses landed with a sickening thud, fracturing his fourth thoracic vertebra. A resident on the first floor opened his patio door, peered at Ulysses’ crumpled body and then closed the door and blinds. Unable to move, Ulysses laid in a shattered heap beneath his victim’s apartment for half an hour until an ambulance arrived.

Paralyzed from the waist down, Elijah was having the best night of his life. He just didn’t know it yet.

Born again

Broken and alone after his fall, Ulysses laid in a Grady Hospital bed staring at the ceiling and reckoning silently with the knowledge he would never walk again.

He didn’t know it at the time, but his saving grace was just outside his hospital room door, taking notes on a clipboard and preparing her newest patient for rehabilitation. Her name was Laura Johnson.

Kind, chatty and approachable, Laura meets everyone with a cheery smile and a disarming demeanor. By the time Ulysses came into her life, Laura was an experienced physical therapist at Grady’s spinal unit. She knew that the people in her care needed to break the riptide of momentum pulling them under. They needed someone to inspire them. Someone to give them more than physical strength.

There is a playbook to follow in the weeks and months that follow a serious spinal-cord injury. For most, the physical work of recovery and the psychological impact of paralysis hit all at once. Everything has to be learned all over again. How to get dressed. How to get into and out of bed, or a slippery bathtub, or the wheelchair. How to manage urination and defecation without any sensation below the waist. It is hard, humbling work.

“I don’t know how many people have really believed in Ulysses along the way,” said Laura. “We were building more than his muscles.”

It worked.

Under Laura’s care in the early weeks of 1991, Ulysses accomplished in three weeks the entire eight-week rehabilitation program. He was hungry to succeed and he had the ideal person to push him. He’d broken himself in the commission of a crime, but Laura did not judge him. People of all backgrounds can break their backs, and Laura’s job was to prepare them for life in a wheelchair.

“He realized, I think, that this was a new take on life and that maybe he was ready for a new identity,” Laura said. “He completely ate up any kind of positive encouragement.”

For all his shortcomings, Ulysses is easy to like. He has an almost childlike, happy-go-lucky optimism. He smiles wide and repeats the last couple words sometimes. Last couple words. It’s endearing. He has an obvious desire to please people.

After Ulysses got out of the hospital, he spent several months in jail awaiting trial for the crime that resulted in his fall, but charges were ultimately dropped.

When he got out, Laura continued to work with him for about a year. Then she introduced him to her colleague, Nancy Lehrer, who took Laura’s place when she left Grady to work in Europe for a while.

Miss Nancy, Ulysses called her, was the second person to help change his life.

Nancy’s demeanor is more guarded than Laura’s, her physical presence more slight, her cards held a little closer to the chest. But Nancy is no slouch, and the women shared a similar approach to their work.

Nancy recognized that Ulysses needed a new path, not just recovery from the bumps along his old one. She was there the day a racing wheelchair was brought to Grady to demonstrate what spinal injury patients could aspire to.

“Ulysses was pretty into that racing chair,” she recalled. “I don’t know if he’d ever really considered that he could still be athletic. When he saw it and understood what it was for, it was like a light bulb turned on in his head.”

So one autumn day, nine months after his fall, Ulysses, Nancy and Laura (in the waning days before she left Grady) went to the track at Avondale High School. The physical therapists watched as he took his first laps around the track. Ulysses was a natural. Speed and power were again at his disposal for the first time since he’d scaled that apartment building on New Year’s Eve.

“I was feeling pretty good that day,” Ulysses recalled with a smile.

Nancy would eventually introduce Ulysses to John Rupert, the third person to contribute to the rebirth of Ulysses. Now deceased, John was a medical supply salesman at Advanced Rehabilitation, but he was different from his industry peers. Where other vendors would run up against resistance from insurance agencies not wanting to pay for certain things and simply give up, John would find creative solutions. He got things done. Things like getting Ulysses a racing chair and establishing a training routine. Things like making the drive from Roswell to Ulysses’ Glenco neighborhood in DeKalb County, gathering Ulysses and his shiny new racing chair — or bike, as he calls it— and returning to Roswell to train before taking Ulysses back home.

John sometimes took an unorthodox approach to training. One day when they were en route to the track to train for Ulysses’ first competition in the Peachtree Road Race, John drove past the exit, continuing along Georgia 400 north to Forsyth County. John eventually stopped and unloaded Ulysses and the racing chair.

Forty-five minutes, he told Ulysses. That is how long you have to finish the Peachtree Road Race before they’ll pull you off the course. You want to run the Peachtree? Gotta do it in 45 minutes. See you at my office.

John drove off, leaving Ulysses on the side of the road. Forsyth County in 1992 was safer for a black man wheeling down a highway than it would have been in, say, September 1912. But the message was not lost on Ulysses: Run for your life.

Running – that’s what he calls his speed chair rides.

And so Ulysses did run; making it to John’s Roswell office in 41 minutes flat.

And he ran a few weeks later in his first Peachtree Road Race. 36 minutes.

He remembers the finish line clearly.

“It was my first really big thing since I’d been in the wheelchair. It’s a big thing for a lot of folks. You got people and racing chair racers coming from all over the country. I had trained every day. Every race is a good opportunity to cross that finish line. But the first finish line? I remember that.”

A new Ulysses — wheelchair racing Ulysses — was born.