by Leslie Scrivener

In February 1979, nearly two years after his right leg was amputated above the knee, Terry Fox began running in secret. Embarrassed by his artificial leg — a crude device made of a stainless steel shaft, a belt around his waist, and an elastic strap — he ran at night. The twenty-year-old was a competitive athlete and didn’t want to be seen struggling.

Yet, it was a stuggle. He ran one quarter of a mile around the cinder track at a junior high school near his home in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia. Under the dark sky, the rain fell on the lonely runner and on the tall firs that bordered the track. “It was hard,” he said. “I was sweating, wiped out.” Soon he was running a half mile, then a full mile.

This was phenomenal, he thought. He was getting stronger and growing more confident. A jock, watchful for any chance to compete, Terry felt a small victory the day he was fast enough to run past a pair of joggers.

He didn’t talk to anyone about why he wanted to run or, more telling, why he had to run. It was something he kept to himself. For two years, since the surgery to remove his leg — he’d had bone cancer — he had harboured a dream to run across Canada. He knew of an amputee who had run in the New York City Marathon, so why couldn’t he do something challenging, too?

Terry offered lots of reasons why a 5,300-mile (8,500-kilometre) run across the second-largest country in the world seemed to be the one thing he had to do. He had known the suffering of young cancer patients while he was receiving chemotherapy treatment. Their cries haunted him still. He was one of the lucky ones, he thought. He would raise money for cancer research and prove himself “worthy of life,” as he wrote in a letter to the Canadian Cancer Society, asking for its support. “I was determined to take myself to the limit for this cause.”

His mother, Betty, asked him, why not run across British Columbia. She thought running across Canada was crazy. Why set such a daunting task? They argued about it, but Betty lost that battle. Terry, meanwhile, lost toenails. He suffered bone bruises, but it was never unbearable, he said. It was just pain; he could adjust his prosthesis and his running style, and learn to endure it.

Terry trained the rest of that year. He had blisters and open sores that bled down through the valve in the bucket that held the stump of his leg. It drenched his socks. That was a horrible sight for Betty, almost cruel. But Terry was consumed by his need to run. “I cannot stand to see life pass by so quickly without some kind of accomplishment, some meaningful milestone.... My sense of urgency grows stronger with each passing day,” he wrote.

In the spring of 1980, Terry was ready to begin his Marathon of Hope. His goal, when he set out from St. John’s, Newfoundland, was to raise $1 million.

On April 12, he dipped his foot in the Atlantic Ocean, collected a jug of sea water, and, wearing shorts and a T-shirt — he had long shed his embarrassment about his artificial leg — began to run across Canada.

Editors at the Toronto Star had heard about Terry, but only one of them, Bonnie Cornell, who edited the Family section, thought he merited a story. As a hardened newsman said dismissively, Terry would be news only when he stopped running. It’s boring, said another.

But Cornell, a tough editor with an instinct for spotting trends and unusual feature stories, had seen Terry on the CBC television news and kept thinking about him. I worked for her and had been at the paper a little more than a year. She asked me to “find out if he’s for real.”

The switchboard operators at the Star were doggedly determined, too — qualities you wouldn’t immediately grasp just hearing their cheerful, buttery smooth voices. When I asked them to find a one-legged runner somewhere in Newfoundland, there was no problem. These are women who had found a Star reporter in a jail cell in Idi Amin’s Uganda. A few hours later they told me, “We have Mr. Terry Fox on the line.”

The thing about Terry Fox is he made you believe it was entirely possible that an amputee could run across Canada. He was running into the wind, and every day he was averaging a marathon — twenty-six miles (forty-two kilometres). It was an astounding athletic achievement.

We talked once a week or more on the phone. I wrote bland news stories about who he’d met or how he felt frustrated when the Canadian Cancer Society failed to organize a fundraiser in the little towns he was passing through. He was doing the running; couldn’t someone else look after the business of fundraising? He told me about a motivational poem, “It Couldn’t be Done,” that he read each night before going to bed. Sometimes he described how he felt as he ran: “When I’m really tired, I’m actually crying on the road. I get so emotional, but being in that state keeps me going.”

Doug Alward, his childhood friend and another committed athlete, was Terry’s wheelman. He drove a donated van, stopping ahead of Terry at one-mile intervals. By the time they reached Halifax, they were pretty much at war with each other, so Terry’s parents flew in to broker peace. Terry could be chippy; Doug would withdraw into sullen silence. Terry would argue; Doug wouldn’t. They later sent Darrell, Terry’s sweet-natured seventeen-year-old brother, to help and act as a buffer between the two friends.

I finally met Terry on a sunny June afternoon. Seeing him on television or in news photos was different from seeing his living body on the hard pavement of a Canadian highway.

Maybe because of the scale — the long highway, the tall trees — he appeared smaller than his five-foot, ten-inch height. He was in Quebec, heading toward the Ontario border. Terry didn’t look up when I shouted as I drove past him.

He raised his arm in a kind of greeting. He had a lopsided gait, dubbed the Fox Trot — two hops with his good leg to match the longer stride of his artificial leg.

On the Ontario side of the Ottawa River, a celebration was underway to welcome him to a new province. A band played “Georgie Girl,” balloons drifted to the sky, and Terry walked up to a community centre to shake hands with officials. The crowd shouted, “Hip, hip, hooray.” His hard concentration and focus were gone. He was attentive to what people were saying. “I hope this walk, excuse me, this run...,” an Ontario MPP began. Terry smiled.

He had been studying kinesiology at Simon Fraser University, and though he had been a hard-driving competitor on the basketball team, he was terribly shy — so much so that he avoided classes that required oral presentations. That was all behind him. He took the microphone and told his story. He said the kind of support he was seeing, all these people coming out to welcome him, made a big difference to his Marathon of Hope.

A fourteen-year-old boy who had been doing wheelies on the grass couldn’t exactly say why Terry’s speech moved him. “I found that story of his very touching,” said Charles Tuttle. “It makes a funny feeling inside me.” At a press conference, a reporter asked if he was running to find himself. “This isn’t soul-searching,” Terry said. “I’m not trying to find something. I’ve found what I want.”

The images of the next thirty-six hours are sharp thirty years later: the shoppers who gawked as he ran through the town of Hawkesbury; Terry’s pre-dinner snack — cheeseburger, fries, apple pie, a milkshake; the way he clenched his jaw when a Cancer Society official told him he was expected to speak at a fair in Plantagenet, just down the road. This was unexpected and the kind of thing that happened too often.

"I’m not going,” he said. He was spent. The days were long. There were no days off on which to recover from his daily marathon; he just got up and did it all over again.

But the mayor was waiting, and there would be fundraising. And so he did what was expected of him, running into the fair, politely signing autographs after he’d finished speaking. No one could tell that this had not been the plan from the start.

Soon it was evening; dinner was at the Poplar Motel, where there was more serious eating to be done. Terry was lively and curious in conversation — what was this about Quebec holding a referendum to separate from Canada, he asked.

At 4:30 the next morning Terry and the Marathon of Hope routine began again. It was dark as Doug drove through the countryside, looking for the pile of stones they’d left where Terry had stopped running the previous day. No one spoke.

The moon was high; it gleamed off the farm buildings. We could see cattle in the fields and there was sweetness in the cool, still air.

Terry loved that morning and remembered it. The miles went by so lightly, he recalled. “I just floated.” He could run in peace and by 6:00 a.m. he’d finished five miles (eight kilometres). A CBC reporter jogged with him part of the way. Terry, competitive in his bones, didn’t like two-legged runners too close to him. “I want to make those guys work,” he said. “I can’t stand making it easy.”

The day wore on. There was a rest break in the drowsy, sun-soaked countryside. There was a parade-like atmosphere in Rockland, where people ran out on the street, then back into their houses to bring out someone else to witness Terry running through their town.

Later, in Ottawa, Terry was looking forward to meeting then Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau; he hoped the vigorous Trudeau, who had somersaulted into swimming pools and slid down banisters, would spare a half-hour to run with him. It was a disappointment. The prime minister seemed unprepared and knew nothing about Terry or his run. “It was as if Trudeau was talking to Terry and thinking about something else,” his brother Darrell said.

Trudeau may not have given Terry the welcome he’d hoped for, but there were others who were wise enough to see that Terry was someone special. Isadore Sharp, founder of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, who’d lost a son to cancer, challenged Canadian corporations to pledge two dollars for every mile Terry ran. Sharp, who became a trusted friend and adviser to the Fox family, wanted to ensure Terry’s legacy endured and later that year started the annual Terry Fox Run.

By the time Terry reached Toronto, Canadians were lining the streets, cheering him. It really did seem, at the time, that that summer was bathed in some kind of golden glow. He had become a hero — in one town someone even crowned him with a leafy wreath. It was showtime for the Marathon of Hope.

There was a triumphant run down University Avenue. Women were in tears. Volunteers were hauling in buckets of money. One single day brought in $100,000. But raising money wasn’t consistent. Terry flew to Niagara Falls, where he was handed a cheque for $100; it was an embarrassment.

He angrily refused to visit Marineland in Niagara Falls when he learned he wouldn’t be able to use the appearance to raise money. He rebuffed all commercial endorsements and abhorred the thought that he or his run could be used for anything other than funding for cancer research; he was almost fanatic about it, even making sure the grey shorts he always wore were logo-free. Still, his original goal of $1 million seemed pitifully small; he set a new goal, one dollar for every Canadian, about $24 million in total. Did that seem absurdly high?

By now his friends were hearing a different tone in Terry’s speeches, something more subtle and shaded. He started saying that if for some reason he couldn’t finish the run, the Marathon of Hope had to go on without him. Everyone was a part of it, he said.

It was about this time that Doug and Darrell started looking at Terry and the run a little differently. They sensed a change, a deepening. Doug, who was thoughtful and had more time to think about things behind the wheel of the van, believed they were at a turning point. What that was exactly, he wasn’t sure.

Terry ran on through the sweltering heat of southern Ontario — some days it was thirty-eight degrees Celsius — going hundreds of miles out of his way — worth it, he believed, for the extra fundraising. It was a relief to head north, to leave the crowds behind. But after the euphoria, they faced something unexpected, a new critical tone in the media.

"Give it up, Terry,” the Peterborough Examiner implored. The Globe and Mail painted a portrait of him as a tyrant to his lighthearted younger brother.

He wasn’t happy to see me, either, at Lake Joseph near Gravenhurst, Ontario, where he was resting one afternoon. There had been reports that his leg was bleeding. War Amps officials warned that Terry was going to have terrible problems if he continued running at the pace he had set for himself. They had reports that the stump of his leg was changing shape and developing sores. They wanted him to see an orthopedic specialist. It was hard, they said, to say anything critical of Terry’s run, because it could look as if the organization wasn’t supporting him.

This only irritated Terry, who insisted that he knew his body and what he was capable of better than anyone else. “I’ve seen people in so much pain. This little bit of pain I’m going through is nothing. They can’t shut it off, and I can’t shut down every time I feel a little sore.” As he headed north, the crowds thinned. The rock star business that had diverted them through the southern part of the province was well behind them. They were more serious now; they needed to get home.

Terry blew off his medical checkups. Darrell noticed that Terry’s steps seemed more laboured; he didn’t have the same comfort in his stride that Darrell had seen in New Brunswick. What was wrong? Then there was a brittle, repetitive cough that they had never heard before.

By September 1, the cough was persistent, and with it came a pain that spread into his chest. It hurt to run, but he ran anyway, because there were people on the road. As any athlete knows, you don’t want to let your people down. His chest hurt, but his legs were working fine, so he kept running. People were cheering him on, saying, “You can make it all the way.” He heard what they said, and wondered if he would make it all the way.

He had run 3,339 miles (5,373 kilometres) — two-thirds of the way across Canada. He’d run through snow, biting wind, and terrible heat. He’d nearly been run over. He’d seen camera crews covering his run injured in car accidents. He’d fought with organizers. He’d played jokes on his brother. He’d had food fights with Doug. He’d been ignored. He’d been idolized. He’d run nearly a marathon a day for 143 days.

Terry called his parents to tell them his old enemy, cancer, was back. They flew to Thunder Bay, Ontario, and took him in their arms and cried.

"Isn’t once enough?” Darrell asked bitterly.

But as Terry said later on, “That’s the thing about cancer.”

Terry spoke to reporters at the Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster, British Columbia, the same hospital where his leg had been amputated three years earlier. Betty held his hand and cried. We listened gravely. He’d raised $1.7 million, not the sum he’d hoped; still, he didn’t want anyone to finish his run, even though Darryl Sittler offered to organize NHL hockey players to collect pledges and run the last 2,000 miles (3,200 kilometres). Someone asked Betty how she was doing. She couldn’t answer. “We’ve been through this before,” his father Rolly said.

Upstairs, in his hospital room, Terry talked to some old friends, including wheelchair basketball star Rick Hansen. That day in the hospital, nobody wanted to be the first to bring up the subject of cancer. But Terry did. He didn’t want anyone feeling sorry for him. “It’s one thing to run across Canada, but now people are really going to know what cancer is.”

That fall, Terry drove me to all the places he had trained in 1979. We went up steep hills in the woods, to Simon Fraser University and to the track where he ran his first mile. He was pale and thin and looked like a teenager. He was given awards, athletic and honorary, and was the youngest person to receive the Order of Canada. The country did go crazy with fundraising, as he had hoped. By February 1, 1981, $24.17 million had been raised for cancer research. He had eight chemotherapy treatments between September and January, but still the cancer consumed him.

The last time I saw him was at his family’s Christmas party. He left the living room early, pulling his sweater up over his shoulders as he walked down the hall to his room.

In the five months that he ran his Marathon of Hope, and in the years that followed, Terry became part of us, just as the bedrock of the Canadian Shield is part of Canada. It’s taken three decades to understand precisely what that means. He is in our geography now. A B.C. mountain and an icebreaker were named after him, as were thirty-two streets, seven statues, fourteen schools, and nine fitness trails. He was the first person other than a king or a queen to be put on a Canadian general circulation coin, the 2005 loonie. Yet there is much more to his legacy than that.

The three million people who take part in the Terry Fox Run held each September, and throughout the year in schools across the country have raised $550 million. The infusion of new funds boosted cancer research in Canada in the early 1980s. Since then, more than $450 million has been invested in research through nearly 1,200 grants and awards.

This research reflects Terry’s own spirit — it is adventurous and innovative, but still practical. Terry Fox-funded scientists are not bound to the letter of their grant proposal. If they encounter new pathways that seem more promising than what they initially proposed, they can follow those new directions. Advances in lymphoma and prostate cancer research, imaging technology and other areas, have been made possible through Terry Fox-funded research.

Every year since 1982, some twenty students have won Terry Fox Humanitarian Awards, and their achievements ripple around the world. These award-winners have excelled: Six became Rhodes Scholars, seventy became physicians, and fifty became teachers.

Dr. Roshni Dasgupta won a Terry Fox Humanitarian Award that paid her way to McGill University. She became a pediatric surgeon at Cincinnati’s Children’s Hospital, where the day I spoke to her, she had operated on an eighteen-year-old boy who had bone cancer in his right leg. It had spread to his lungs. She was operating on someone just like Terry.

Canadian children grow up with the story of the ordinary boy who became extraordinary Terry’s story inspired Canadian speed skater and four-time Olympian Kristina Groves. He wasn’t the strongest or the fastest athlete; in fact, he was probably one of the worst players on his junior high school basketball team, she explained. She didn’t start off as the most talented speed skater, either. But, she said, “I can identify so strongly with his effort to become the best.”

Terry’s wheelchair basketball teammate, Rick Hansen, went on to heroic achievements of his own and wheeled around the world, creating a foundation that has donated some $200 million for spinal cord research. He learned from Terry how to dig deep, he said, and to find more potential inside himself than he ever dreamed possible.

A few years ago, I drove from Ontario to Juan de Fuca Park on the west coast of Vancouver Island to see what would have been the end of the road for the Marathon of Hope. It is a wild and rocky place, where ropes of kelp turn in the roiling bay and signs warn of rogue waves. Douglas fir stand tall around the bay — trees just like the ones that framed the running track where Terry had trained in the darkness years before.

I asked people on the beach if they knew about Terry, and they did; it had been that way all across Canada. Everyone had a story about Terry, or felt a connection to him. One of the women on the beach that day said she taught English to new Canadians and said Terry’s story is popular among her Chinese students, who love tales of people who overcome obstacles. I met a twenty-eight-year-old surfer who was part of a group of young men who called themselves the Extreme Kindness Crew. “Terry is what I want to be; he’s what I want to create in the world,” the young man said.

He was only three years old when Terry ran. They’d never met. But, as with countless others, Terry had become the best part of him, just as he became an enduring, timeless part of Canada’s story.

July 28, 1958

Terrance Stanley Fox is born in Winnipeg to Rolly and Betty Fox. The family moves to British Columbia in 1966.

October 15, 1979

After losing his right leg to cancer, Terry writes to the Canadian Cancer Society to announce he is running across Canada to raise money to fight the disease.

April 12, 1980

Terry Fox dips his artificial leg in the waters off Newfoundland, beginning his Marathon of Hope.

July 1, 1980

Terry arrives in Ottawa for Canada Day. He kicks the opening ball of a CFL exhibition game with his good leg. The crowd of 16,000 gives him a standing ovation.

July 11, 1980

Terry meets his idol, Darryl Sittler of the Toronto Maple Leafs. The marathon raises $100,000 in a single day.

August 5, 1980

Terry reaches Sudbury, Ontario, the halfway point of his planned route across Canada.

September 1, 1980

Terry is forced to stop his run outside of Thunder Bay, Ontario. Doctors discover that cancer has spread to his lungs. Canadians everywhere are shocked by the news.

September 2, 1980

Isadore Sharp, chairman and CEO of Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, tells the Fox family that he plans to organize an annual charity run in Terry’s name.

September 9, 1980

The CTV network broadcasts a star-studded telethon. It lasts five hours and raises $10 million. Terry watches the event from his hospital bed.

September 18, 1980

Terry becomes the youngest inductee into the Order of Canada.

He later wins the Lou Marsh Award for athletic achievement.

February 1, 1981

Terry’s hope of raising one dollar from every

Canadian is realized.

Canada’s population reaches 24.1 million; fundraising totals $24.17 million.

June 28, 1981

Terry Fox dies at Royal Columbian Hospital in New Westminster, British Columbia, one month short of his twenty-third birthday.

July 30, 1981

A stretch of the Trans-Canada Highway between Thunder Bay and Nipigon in Northwestern Ontario is renamed the Terry Fox Courage Highway.

September 13, 1981

The first annual Terry Fox Run is held. About 300,000 people participate, raising $3.5 million.

February 11, 1994

The Terry Fox Hall of Fame opens in Toronto. It recognizes people who make extraordinary contributions to enriching the quality of life of people with physical disabilities.

June 30,1999

Terry Fox is voted Canada’s greatest all-time hero in a month-long national online survey by the Dominion Institute and Council for Canadian Unity. Frederick Banting, discoverer of insulin, comes in second.

September 16, 2005

More than three million students from nine thousand Canadian schools participate in the first annual Terry Fox National School Run Day.

September 19, 2010

The thirtieth annual Terry Fox Run is held. The international event has to date raised about $550 million for cancer research.