I put those thoughts out of my mind and pushed on to 40k. My mom and aunt were standing on a bridge holding a sign with my name on it. That spurred me on for a few hundred metres.
Dianne, Dad, money.
I don’t remember much about the final stretch or crossing the finish line, except that I almost started crying. It was more relief than jubilation.
Just after the finish I ran into a friend who had completed many marathons. “Congratulations,” he said. “By the way, now is not the time to decide if you want to run another marathon.”
I smiled and didn’t respond. But I think I’d already decided.
I was back again the next year and the year after that.
I don’t know exactly when I became totally hooked on this foolish passion, when running became part of me instead of me simply being part of a race.
But I like to think the turning point was in those final few kilometres of my first marathon, when I drew on the inspiration of my sister and father and the dozens of people who believed enough in me to contribute a few dollars toward my race.
Somewhere on the long, slow uphill climb, I stopped doubting I could finish and started believing I was a runner.
A great running nation
iRun because it’s cheaper than playing hockey Eli Adamson, Ontario
To those who think this is a hockey country, I say Canada is a nation of runners. We’re home to thousands and thousands who train in some of the toughest elements in the world. We have a rich history of champions and record-breakers. And one Canadian is simply the greatest runner of all time.
True, we may not have won as many international track meets as hockey tournaments. And Canadians may not be the favourites at any of the major marathons. But this is still the country that sent Tom Longboat to victory in Boston and Donovan Bailey to a gold medal in Atlanta. And produced dozens of other great champions in between.
This is a land with as many as a million runners. That’s about double the number of hockey players. And many Canadians run all year round in one of the most extreme climates on the planet. Show me another country where you train for a marathon when it’s minus-30 and run the event when it’s plus-25, all in the same city.
Still not convinced? Consider this: when the people of this country were asked by a TV network to vote on the Greatest Canadian, the guy who came second (and should have won) was a runner. If you were to ask Canadians of any age to name their biggest Canadian hero, a huge number would name that runner. What other country (except maybe Kenya) can say that?
Many have run faster than Terry Fox. A small few have run farther. But no other runner in human history combines his incredible athletic achievement and the impact he continues to have on millions of lives around the world. Who else could have even conceived of running across the world’s second largest country on only one leg?
Through the simple yet profound act of running, for 143 days and more than 5,000 kilometres, Terry Fox transformed the way people think, inspired millions of people and launched a legacy that will last a century and beyond.
Terry’s legacy has spread farther than he ever dreamed. Since the Marathon of Hope in 1980, more than $400 million has been raised for cancer research in his name. There have been Terry Fox Runs in fifty countries around the world. Name another runner who is known everywhere from Argentina to Australia, by kids who weren’t even born when he died.
Terry died in 1981 at the age of twenty-two. Although he didn’t live to see it, he knew about the first Terry Fox Run. Could he have imagined more than thirty? It’s hard to believe, but the Terry Fox Run is now older than Terry Fox was.
Try to conjure a picture of Terry Fox at fifty, which he would have turned in 2008. It’s almost impossible. Terry Fox will always be the picture of youthful nerve and determination. Indeed, an image of that sunburnt kid is ingrained into the highest level of the Canadian consciousness. The Terry Fox we know just wouldn’t do as a middle-aged guy. Terry isn’t ageless, he’s permanently young.
But time has marched on since Terry’s Marathon of Hope ended on Sept. 1, 1980. There are kids in school today whose parents were children when Terry died. Thankfully, Terry Fox is as much a hero to them as he was to the people who witnessed his incredible journey. Considering Terry was gone long before the Internet, text-messaging and American Idol, that’s saying something.
As just one of millions of examples, seven-year-old Samantha Clarke raised $100 for the Terry Fox Run in 2008 after her grandfather died of cancer. In the year following that, she raised $9,000 more. She sold off her toys and even asked her family to give her money for cancer research at Christmas, instead of gifts.
Terry Fox started with a dream of raising one dollar per Canadian for cancer research. By the time he died he had already made his goal, some $25 million raised from a population of twenty-four million.
The Terry Fox Run is a race like no other. You don’t even have to show up at the beginning of the race to participate. Nor do you have to run the Terry Fox Run. Just be there sometime that day and walk, run, bike, wheel or rollerblade ten kilometres.
No one will check if you’ve walked the entire course and there are no timing devices. But pretend you’re a cancer survivor with only one leg and picture yourself doing some forty kilometres a day for 143 days. Then 10k might not seem like so much.
No runner on earth has made a greater impression on so many people than Terry Fox. That’s why Canada is not only a great running nation, it’s home to the greatest runner of all time.
Reaching the tipping point
iRun because running gives me so much in return Terry SanCartier, Quebec
“What happened to you?”
It’s not very often I get this question from my wife at the end of an 8k run. But it’s not very often I return from a short run with my shirt absolutely soaked with sweat and looking like I just ran for my life from a family of bears.
What happened to me was Malcolm Gladwell. The brainiac best-selling author was in Ottawa in June 2009 for a United Way event at which I was given the privilege of interviewing him onstage at the National Arts Centre.
Gladwell is renowned for his thought-provoking analytical research and powerful storytelling that have yielded the hugely successful books The Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. But long before he was a champion of non-fiction, Gladwell was a top-ranked middle-distance runner. As a teenager, he was Ontario’s best 1,500-metre runner and set a Canadian record in his age category.
In our brief chat before we went on stage, I asked him if he was still running. Gladwell said chronic knee problems limited him to about forty minutes per run, but he still got out several times a week.
As a matter of fact, he added, he was planning to go for a run that evening in Ottawa, once our event was over.
Really?
But he wasn’t sure where to run. He knew of the path along Ottawa’s Rideau Canal, but because of his knees he wanted to run somewhere that offered a softer running surface alongside the path.
I told him about the route along the Ottawa River, starting at the
