- Hey out there, Akronites, welcome once again to "Around Akron with Blue Green," and wow, do we have an amazing episode ahead of us today.

I'm gonna meet up with Akron Promise, and learn all about the City Series Marathon Races they're putting on.

Then it's off to Downtown Akron, and I'm gonna learn all about Thai food at Cilantro.

Then it's right next door to Cilantro to the Axe House, where I'm gonna learn how to throw an axe.

Then I meet up with Shammas Malik, the presumptive new mayor of Akron, and see what he's all about.

So, to kick this show off today I'm gonna head over to Summit Lake, where I'm gonna meet up with Tom Ghinder, and I'm gonna learn all about the Akron Promise City Series Marathon Races.

Let's go see what that's all about.

(bright music) - For about 10 years, I was running 5Ks around town, and I'd seen the same people at some of the events, and one in particular, Larry O'Neil, from the Lawn Wranglers Running Club.

And he and I were at the West Akron African American 5K, oh, I'd say about five or six years ago, and he and I were talking about how few people we see at multiple races and we said, "Wouldn't it be cool if we put a city series together?

Just tied 'em all together."

And so that's what I decided to work on with Larry and with others and to put a series of races together that people can run all summer long in different neighborhoods of Akron to see the different places in Akron, to experience the different environments and the different neighborhoods.

(bright music) Two years ago, post-pandemic, we started putting it together and last year we had our first City Series, Akron Promise City Series Neighborhood Races.

So it's all sponsored by Akron Promise, another organization I'm involved in.

Last year we had eight races and those who participate in more than half, they got a medal from Akron Promise, as well as T-shirt, and we're gonna do the same thing this year.

This year we have 10 races, two of which have already occurred.

We had the Hop for Hope in April, and that benefits cancer patients.

All of the races benefit people in Akron, children and families mainly, helping them academically, or socially, or with bills, or whatever's required.

Hop for Hope was in the Merriman Valley, and so that was a nice run out and back on Akron Peninsula Road.

Their second race was a brand new race this year, the APS 5K, the Akron Public School's 5K, put on by Cameo Crumby to benefit Akron Public Schools.

And that race is in Cascade Valley, runs along the towpath and it's a beautiful spring race.

Now we have the races coming up beginning in May.

The Race for Case has been going on for a number of years, and it runs around the Wallhaven neighborhood of Akron.

One thing to say about all of these races, is that each of them has an event, or a festival, or some other reason to be there.

And they also all have one mile fun-runs, walks.

Now I gotta say that with a 5K, you don't need to run.

Most people could walk it in an hour, an hour and 15 minutes, pleasant walk.

This one out here, which will be coming soon, that's the Rock Me On The Water 5K.

Starts on Kenmore Boulevard in Kenmore and comes up Kenmore Boulevard and then goes around this beautiful lake at Summit Lake.

And this one's 7K, it's a little bit longer, so it's a little over four miles.

But we had plenty of people walking it last year around this beautiful lake on Kenmore Boulevard.

Our next race is in June.

It's a Four Leaf Clover Race.

It runs in the West Hill neighborhood, it starts over by St. Vincent's Church, goes down through Glendale Cemetery, and ends in the St. Vincent-St. Mary Stadium, and they have a big music festival afterwards.

The Andrea Rose Teodosio Foundation runs a race at Downtown Akron, and that's another part of the Towpath Trail.

It has involved block three, I'm not sure of the exact route this year, but it's a fun race downtown.

And next comes our August races, the West Akron 5K.

And so, they have a men's health fair there where they'll do health screenings, you can get information on health issues there.

Summa's been a big supporter of them in the past.

And that runs through West Akron neighborhood, up around Schneider Park, and starts at Buchtel High School.

Now, my favorite race happens to be Akron's Holiday PorchRokr.

The PorchRokr 5K is in Highland Square, and it's a great way to start the day.

We do the race in the morning and then after the race they have yoga and then the music festival that runs all day there in Highland Square.

So, really looking forward to that race this year.

And we wrap up the season in Middlebury, with the P.S.

I Love You 5K, sponsored by the Kohl YMCA.

And that's a nice race around Middlebury, through the neighborhoods there.

And then we have a festival where we celebrate all the runners from the Akron Promise City Series.

(bright music) We have signup available at AkronPromise.org/CitySeries, and you can sign up for as many races as you want.

All the signups are right there, it's very easy.

We also sponsor Akron Public School's youth into as many races as we can, and so if you have Akron Public Schools youth, they can get free entry by getting in touch with me, Tom@AkronPromise.org, or sending us a message through the website.

And so we've had 10 or 12 kids in every race that are sponsored and are really enjoying their summertime, getting together, seeing their friends.

And a couple of the kids have been winning many of the races, so that's pretty fun.

(bright music continues) - Now we're off to Downtown Akron.

We're gonna visit one of my favorite restaurants, Cilantro, and learn all about Thai food and its spice level.

Let's go see what Cilantro is all about.

(bright chimes) - Since I came to the United States back in 2000, the year of 2001, actually, my uncle and my aunt has a restaurant down in Cincinnati, and so I was helping them for couple years, until I start going to college.

During college I also work as a server at the other Thai restaurant in Dayton, Ohio.

Once I graduate, I also was promoted to be a manager of the restaurant for about a year or two.

And then I'm start looking to start up my own restaurant.

How did I end up in Akron?

How did I found this location?

I was working with the Downtown Akron's, Economics Development Departments before, so they recommended this particular location, because the restaurant previously was closed down and it was sitting empty, looking for somebody else to breathe the life back into, you know, the space again.

And so when I got an opportunity to come in, just to look around for the first time, if you would believe in the love of first sight, that's how I felt.

When I walked in, this place was beautiful.

We had a lot of all the aspects that I'm looking for, and it was pretty much a turnkey location.

You can set everything up and then you can just, you know, open your door.

And it took us probably about three months to get everything ready to go.

(peaceful music) This building happened to be located in Downtown Akron.

I believe historically it used to be a bank, actually, several banks in the '60s, and the '70s.

Then after that it was renovated to become an Italian restaurant called Piatto.

It was a high-end Italian restaurant, ran by a very famous chef, Roger Thomas.

(peaceful music continues) Cilantro Thai and Sushi has been in business for 13 years now.

We specialize in Thai cuisines.

We offer a lot of classic Thai dishes like pad thai, pad see ew, spiced fried rices, Thai curries.

And we also have a full Japanese sushi bar that we serve fresh handmade sushi also.

So you can get the best of both cuisines in one place.

and that's what we known for.

(upbeat music) Cilantro happened to being used quite a bit in Thai cuisine as well.

When we come up with the name and the concept, we just wanna be a little bit different than another Thai restaurants or traditional Thai restaurant's name.

And then we are actually emphasis on the letter C because my family, everybody in our family, actually have the letter us C in our name.

So it's kinda like a little, you know, represent of our family business as well.

(peaceful music) I guess orange, it's my lucky color, to put it that way.

You know, back in the day, my mother, you know, of course, we have this, you know, looking through your horoscopes and whatnot, and she always said, "Stick with either white, orange or black.

Those are your good, lucky colors."

And fortunately out of all of them, orange is my favorite.

It just brightened up everything that will be around it.

And also it just, you know, it's kind of in, you know, you don't get bored with orange for some reason.

You know, red, which is too strong, you know, yellow which is yellow.

So, you know, like McDonald, they have, you know, like with food related color scheme, you know, red and yellows tend to be the color theme to go to, example McDonald.

But I think orange is kinda right there in the perfect spot in the middle of those spectrum.

So, you know, that's why.

(peaceful music continues) For our Thai dishes we have a spice level ranging from number zero to number five, so customer can come in and order their favorite dish and just pick the spice level that they can be enjoying with the perfect spice level.

Now, when it come to perfect spice level, in order to determine that, you might have to come in here for a couple times to be able to figure out where it is, you know, what level that you enjoy the most.

Or maybe over time you might actually able to keep going higher and higher based on your spice tolerance.

But for our new customers, unfortunately the only advice I could tell you would be stay with the low number.

We can always add it to the dish to make it spicier.

We cannot take it away.

(peaceful music continues) - Next up, we're gonna head right next door to Cilantro to the Akron Axe House.

And I'm gonna learn to throw an axe.

Let's go see what the Akron Axe House is all about.

(bright music) - This building started out as a bank and we do have the original vault still in place and we will have some really exciting things coming up in the not-too-distant future involving the rest of the building.

But it's been a bar, it's been a restaurant, it's been a nightclub.

Literally every day somebody tells us, "Yeah, man, I used to go there and I had a great time," and we wanted to keep that tradition going.

But there is something you may or may not encounter.

We're pretty sure that there's ghosts that still live here.

And occasionally they'll tweak with our equipment or something goes on when it should be off, or something's off and it turns back on.

But the building really does have a life of its own, but we love it.

(bright music continues) As a group we were lenders and we did a loan on this building and it didn't work out.

And we ended up taking over the building.

And as a landlord, we thought, you know, what does the town need?

What is Akron looking for?

And we came up with, I don't think Akron's looking for another bar, restaurant.

There are so many great bars, restaurants, breweries, we came up with something as a destination for family entertainment.

We're right next door to the stadium, axe throwing.

And we did axe throwing with a little bit of a twist because everybody else does a boring target.

And we just say no to boring targets.

So you'll see in the background, we have digital projection targets.

So we've got Battleship, Tic-Tac-Toe, 21, Blackjack, Zombie Hunter, Duck Hunter, probably left out a couple, and you can throw it at a target, but our bullseyes move.

So we help you test your skill and it's just a lot of fun.

(bright music continues) We have serious axe throwers that bring their own axes and they throw all over the country.

So as long as their axe kinda fits our protocol, we're fine, we haven't had a problem with that.

But we have a basic axe, it's about two pounds, so it's small enough for anyone to throw.

I think our youngest competitor was probably 10 years old, but you know, he was a pretty good sized young lad and he had no problem.

This is your standard axe that we use.

Anyone can throw it and it's not even that sharp because you don't have to have it razor sharp and throw it hard to stick.

We use a special end grain target which is easier to get it to stick, so to speak.

And it's actually safer 'cause it doesn't bounce back.

We brought in a specialty contractor who does nothing but build axe throwing lanes.

And that way we didn't let our inexperience cause us to make a mistake and get something like, "Oh, we need to redo that, or that's not right."

We knew that the lanes and everything would be world-class because that's all this group does.

(upbeat music) The only people that can't do it are the people that don't show up and try.

Because what we will do is we will do a very brief tutorial, it's not that hard.

Remember, we have to teach kids not to throw stuff.

So everybody we say, "This is a fun place, you're here for a good time, we're gonna show you how to do it."

When we let you fail a few times, we will use some technology and we'll actually video you in slow motion and say, "Here's what's happening, here's what we wanna change."

Nine out of 10 times people go, "Oh."

The proverbial light goes off.

And before you know it, they're sticking it and then they're having a great time.

I don't think we've had any failures where people just, "I can't do this."

(upbeat music continues) - There's only a couple of rules.

Like Alex said, this is so easy.

You're gonna come up, you're gonna take your axe out of the bin.

When you take your turn, you're gonna stay behind, we have some lines on the floor here, so there's a red line, that's our safety line.

So all of the anti-bounce will kinda keep you safe if you stay behind that red line.

(axe thuds) So once you get it to stick into the board, we don't want you to try and grab it and walk away from it because it sometimes will let go, and then that's a good way to get hurt.

So we ask that you put a hand on the bottom and hand on the top and just wiggle it.

It comes out really easy.

The end grain targets just make that better.

Once you take your turn, instead of passing the axe to whoever you're playing with, you're gonna bring it over and put it back in the bin.

The reason we do that is because people get hurt when they're passing it around, not paying attention to what they're doing.

After that, you can use your computer system to mark your scores.

So you get to pick what your scores are.

So if it's more in four than six or however you wanna do that, or if you wanna fight over it, that's totally up to you.

(upbeat music continues) - How many times did I mention it's fun, it's addictive, and we're working with the Ducks?

So come on down, throw axes, then walk next door and go to a baseball game.

We like the idea of positioning ourself as it's one more of the many reasons to come into Downtown Akron, have a good time, have a bite to eat, walk around, do your thing, and axe throwing is just one more thing to do to have fun.

(upbeat music continues) - Now, to wrap this show up today, I am gonna meet up with Shammas Malik, the presumptive future mayor of Akron.

Let's go see what Shammas Malik is all about.

- My mom was the most important person in my life growing up, her name was Helen.

She taught chemical engineering up at the University of Akron.

And to her, life was about finding something you loved doing and using it to give back to other people.

Since I was in like middle school and high school, I've always been interested in government and politics.

I was 10 when 911 happened and like, you know, half White, half Pakistani Muslim kid, I really wanted to know why this terrible tragedy had happened and started learning more about international relations and foreign affairs and national security.

I was always interested in it, you know?

I didn't necessarily think, well, I'm gonna run for this, and this and this, but I went to law school and after law school, came back in 2016.

And one of the key things to me was, you know, as a lawyer you're helping, kinda basically justify the decisions that are made by policy makers, right?

You know, how do we write this policy into law, right?

And I realized what really gets me up out of bed in the morning is the policy choices that we make.

And so it's like, if you wanna do that, if you wanna help decide whether we do this or this, then one way of doing that is running for office.

And so I ran for council in 2019, and then ran for mayor this past year.

You know, it's been a rollercoaster in the process.

(bright music) One of the things that I love about Akron, Dave Lieberth is the first person, he told me this morning, "Akron is the smallest big city in the biggest small town."

And that's what I love about Akron.

I just came from Alladin's in Highland Square.

I think I said hi to every person in the building there.

Akron is a city that's big enough to hold all kinds of folks and small enough that each person really can make an impact.

And you can see that impact on a daily basis.

And so, you know, there are lots of reasons to be cynical about politics, believe me, I get it.

But I've spent the last year, every time I walk into a room, I see people I care about, I see people who inspire me.

I really believe Akron has everything it needs to succeed, but we just need to be more connected, we need to better leverage that talent.

And so, you know, it's been exciting.

It's not all positive, right?

It's a weird experience in your life to get a mailer attacking you in your mailbox.

That was me three weeks ago, or two weeks ago.

So that stuff is silly, but at the end of the day, it was a tremendously meaningful experience.

I think there's negative stuff that comes at you, but also like, I think few people have the experience of having so many people kind of reaching out and showing their support.

And that level of kindness has just been really moving to me as well.

(upbeat chimes) Seven people were running for mayor, and for a lot of folks, maybe they met me in the last year or a couple years ago, but they might have known someone else in the race for 30 years and have deep ties.

And Akron is a city that really thrives off of relationships.

And so I never took any of the stuff personally, even if I, like when I got home, I kinda chuckled to myself and said, "Why can't they see this?"

I didn't take any of this stuff personally, but at the same time people don't fit so neatly inside these boxes, right?

On election day, I'll never forget this, 'cause there really was this beautiful moment.

On election day there was this man, he was 90 years old.

He had some mobility issues, but he kind of, he came over and I started talking to him and he said, "You know, I don't understand why they keep talking about experience.

I don't understand why you need all those years of experience before you can be mayor."

And it's like, you know often it was older folks who would tell me about they saw the importance of younger leadership, right?

And not exclusively younger leadership, but making sure that we're including those bold and fresh and new ideas, while also making sure that we're leaning on experience.

That's why I call some of those folks, like Dave Lieberth, all the time, because I have blind spots and there are experiences that I haven't had that I'm learning through.

One of the things we said a lot on the campaign is like, it's not elect Shammas and sit back and watch me fix it.

We are gonna be building a city where each of the 190,000 people who live in the city have a role to play in the solution.

I really firmly believe that.

And I'm gonna keep talking like that and keep living those values and just taking it one day at a time and just really being thankful and being humbled by it and just try to move forward.

(bright music) Our website, MalikForAkron.com.

I think by the time this airs we're gonna have another website.

Am I good?

So, TogetherForAkron.com, go on there, you can sign up to receive email updates.

We're gonna be communicating a lot throughout this next eight months.

And then going forward, through the city social media and website and everything, we're going to be very clear about our communication.

You know, we're gonna do an all of the above approach so we're not just gonna communicate on one platform, we're gonna try to reach people in every different way.

Everybody interacts differently.

And one thing I loved is the last three and a half years I have a Ward 8 email newsletter once a month, and hopefully we're gonna have a mayoral, maybe it's a weekly newsletter, something like that.

So just some baseline that we're setting, but we're just at the beginning of that process.

(bright music continues) - Thank you once again for watching this episode of "Around Akron with Blue Green."

Now, if you have any questions or any comments, you can catch me on social media.

Thank you and have an amazing day.

(Blue groans) I'm outta frame?

(crew member speaking indistinctly) Whoa.

(crew member speaking indistinctly) Now to kick this show.

(Blue laughs) I gotta have bloopers too, so I thought about that for a second, so I should laugh occasionally.

Okay, so.

Look at that, knocking 'em out one by one.

It's like I know what I'm doing after seven years.

(Blue chuckles) All right, now to wrap this show up today, I need to sit down with the presumptive future, presumptive.

(upbeat music)