The Marathon of Hope: Terry Fox, 143 Days, and the Run Canada Has Never Stopped Finishing

On a cold morning in St. John’s, Newfoundland, on April 12, 1980, a young man walked down to the harbour with two bottles in his hands. He filled one bottle with Atlantic seawater to carry west with him. Then, in front of a small crowd and a few cameras, Terrance Stanley Fox dipped his artificial right leg into the ocean, the way a traveller touches a wall at the start of a pilgrimage. His plan was simple to say and almost impossible to do. He would run across Canada, roughly a marathon every day, all the way to the Pacific, and on the way he would ask every Canadian for a dollar toward cancer research. Canada had about 24 million people that spring. Terry Fox wanted 24 million dollars.

He was 21 years old. He had been born in Winnipeg in 1958 and raised in Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, a stubborn, funny, fiercely competitive kid who was never the most talented athlete on any team and simply refused to be outworked. Almost nobody outside Newfoundland knew his name that April morning. By the end of the summer, the whole country would be watching the road ahead of him, and worrying.

The diagnosis

Three years earlier, in March 1977, Terry Fox was an 18 year old student at Simon Fraser University, a kinesiology student and a junior varsity basketball player, when pain in his right knee sent him to a doctor. The diagnosis was osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer. In that era the standard treatment was brutal and direct. His right leg was amputated about 15 centimetres above the knee, and he went through months of chemotherapy at the BC Cancer Agency in Vancouver.

What he saw on that ward changed the direction of his life. He was, as he later put it, surrounded by people much younger and much older than himself who were suffering, and he was one of the lucky ones. Survival rates for his cancer had improved because of research, and he knew it. He also met patients who did not go home. Before he had even finished treatment he had decided that he needed to do something about the disease that had taken his leg, and he landed on an idea with the plain logic that defined him. He would run across the country, and the country would pay for research, one dollar at a time.

He told almost nobody at first. He played wheelchair basketball, winning national championships with the Vancouver Cable Cars, and he quietly began to prepare for something much larger. His artificial leg was built for walking, not for distance running, and his running stride became a distinctive double hop, one strong step on his left leg and a swing of the prosthetic right. Anyone who saw it once never forgot it. It looked exhausting because it was.

Training in the rain

Terry trained through the wet coastal winter of 1979 and 1980, running before dawn around Port Coquitlam, building distance the slow way. By the time he flew east to start, he had run more than 3,000 miles in training. He had written to the Canadian Cancer Society the previous autumn, in a letter that has since become one of the most quoted documents in Canadian sport. He told them he was not a dreamer, and that a marathon across Canada would take sacrifice and perseverance. He also asked for a support van and a driver, and he set conditions that mattered to him deeply. There would be no corporate sponsorship and no advertising. Nobody was going to profit from this. Every dollar belonged to cancer research.

His friend Doug Alward drove the van. The two of them, with a third friend at the start and later Terry’s younger brother Darrell along for part of the road, were the entire operation. There was no team of handlers, no media bus, and no guarantee of anything. Terry rose around 4:30 each morning, ate, and was on the road in the dark, running set distances between breaks marked on the highway, aiming for about 42 kilometres a day, the length of a marathon. His stump bled. The prosthetic chafed and bruised him. He ran through pain that would have stopped most people in a week, and he did it day after day, in weather that ranged from Atlantic sleet to summer heat.

The quiet start in the Atlantic provinces

For the first part of the run, Canada barely noticed. The Marathon of Hope wound through Newfoundland and across the Maritimes in the spring of 1980 to small crowds and modest donations. Some days the collection along the roadside came to very little. Terry was discouraged at times and said so in his journal, but he kept the same schedule regardless of whether fifty people were watching or five. He ran through Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick, over the bridge of highway into Quebec, his mileage climbing past a thousand kilometres, then two thousand.

Quebec was hard. Donations there were thin, the language barrier was real, and there were days when the run felt invisible. What carried it was persistence and the slow spread of word of mouth. Radio hosts began mentioning the young man running through. Newspapers further west began calling ahead. By the time Terry crossed into Ontario at the end of June, roughly 80 days into the run, the story had begun to move faster than he could.

Ontario wakes up

Ontario changed everything. Crowds grew from dozens to hundreds to thousands. In town after town people lined the highway hours ahead of time, children held hand lettered signs, and firefighters and legion halls and church basements organized collections. When Terry reached Ottawa around Canada Day he was met by large crowds and national attention. In Toronto, where he arrived in mid July, thousands filled Nathan Phillips Square, and he met one of his heroes, hockey player Darryl Sittler, who gave him his 1980 All Star Game sweater. Donations surged. The marathon that had begun in near obscurity had become the story of the Canadian summer.

He kept running west, along the shore of Lake Huron and up toward the great granite country of northern Ontario, keeping the same punishing daily distance. But by late August there were signs that alarmed the people closest to him. He had a persistent cough. He felt tightness in his chest. He told himself it was exhaustion, or a cold, or the dust of the road, and he ran on. On September 1, 1980, near Thunder Bay, after running that day as he had every day, Terry Fox had to stop. He asked Doug to take him to a hospital. Tests confirmed what everyone feared. The cancer had spread to his lungs.

The numbers by then had become a kind of poem Canadians learned by heart. One hundred and forty three days. Five thousand, three hundred and seventy three kilometres. Six provinces. He had raised about $1.7 million by the day he stopped, and the country, stunned, opened its wallets in a way that has few parallels. A national telethon that September raised more than $10 million in a weekend. By February 1981, the Marathon of Hope had passed Terry’s original dream. Canadians had given more than $24 million, roughly a dollar for every person in the country, just as he had asked.

The legend vs. the record

The legend tends to sand Terry Fox down into a saint, and the record is more interesting than the legend. He was not serene about his fate. He could be stubborn to the point of conflict, he quarrelled with the Cancer Society over the handling of his run, and he was angry, really angry, at the cancer that was killing him. His own letters and journal show a practical young man with a temper and a plan, not a poster. Another gentle correction belongs here too. He did not run every step alone in silence, as some retellings imply. He ran with friends, with crowds, with police escorts in the big cities, and sometimes with strangers who simply fell in beside him for a kilometre or two, which he usually welcomed.

What is not legend is the distance, and it checks out in the daily journal and the contemporary reporting. About a marathon a day, 5,373 kilometres in 143 days, on an artificial leg designed in an era before running blades existed. Historians and journalists also note the fact the legend sometimes skips. Terry did not consider the marathon finished when he stopped. From his hospital bed he promised that if he could not finish it, people would have to keep going without him. The annual run was not an invention imposed on his memory afterward. It was his own instruction, offered in public, while he still hoped to recover.

Why it still matters

Terry Fox came home to British Columbia and underwent further treatment, but the cancer could not be stopped. He died on June 28, 1981, a month short of his 23rd birthday. The flags on federal buildings were lowered to half mast, a gesture usually reserved for heads of state, and the country mourned a 22 year old who had never held any office or won any championship.

That September, the first Terry Fox Run was held. It followed the model Terry himself had insisted on for the marathon, and the Terry Fox Foundation, which now stewards his legacy, has guarded that model ever since. The run is not a race. There are no winners, no entry fee, and no minimum amount a person must raise. Schools hold their own runs each autumn, and Terry Fox events now take place in countries around the world. The total raised in his name for cancer research has passed $850 million, funding work through the Terry Fox Research Institute and partner organizations, in laboratories working on the same class of diseases that took his leg and then his life.

His goal, stated at the outset, was not really 24 million dollars. It was, in his own words, to beat cancer and to fund the research that would let other families hear better news than his family heard in 1977. Every September, in schoolyards in Newfoundland and in Port Coquitlam and near the monument outside Thunder Bay where the marathon ended, Canadians set out to run a few kilometres in the rain. None of them will finish his run in the literal sense. He made sure, by the way he designed it, that nobody has to. Everybody just has to keep going.

Common questions

Who was Terry Fox?

Terry Fox was a young man from Port Coquitlam, British Columbia, born in Winnipeg in 1958. A kinesiology student and basketball player at Simon Fraser University, he lost his right leg to osteosarcoma, a form of bone cancer, at 18. What he saw on the cancer ward during treatment convinced him to act against the disease.

How far did Terry Fox run?

Terry Fox ran 5,373 kilometres in 143 days, from April 12 to September 1, 1980, crossing six provinces. He rose around 4:30 each morning and aimed for about 42 kilometres a day, the length of a marathon, on an artificial leg built for walking, using a distinctive double hop stride that exhausted everyone who watched it.

Why did Terry Fox have to stop running?

By late August 1980 Fox had a persistent cough and tightness in his chest, which he blamed on exhaustion and road dust. On September 1, near Thunder Bay, he finally had to stop and go to hospital. Tests confirmed that the cancer had spread to his lungs. He died on June 28, 1981, a month short of his 23rd birthday.

How much money did the Marathon of Hope raise?

Fox had raised about $1.7 million by the day he stopped. A national telethon that September raised more than $10 million in a weekend, and by February 1981 Canadians had given more than $24 million, roughly a dollar for every person in the country, exactly what he had asked for. The total raised in his name has since passed $850 million.

Sources

Every story on this site ends with the sources it was built from. Check us.

• Terry Fox — The Canadian Encyclopedia
• The Terry Fox Foundation — Terry Fox Foundation
• Terry Fox Research Institute — Terry Fox Research Institute
• Terry Fox — Canadian Medical Hall of Fame
• Terry Fox: His Story — Terry Fox Foundation