Terry Fox - Canada's Hero

D could not resist taking off  running on this endless beach on the coast of California during a trip we took to cheer our hockey team, the Vancouver Canucks.

A blog about all things Canadian would never be complete without talking about Terry Fox.  My husband loves to run so I learned very early on who Terry was.  He is considered one of the greatest Canadians of all times.  

I am very proud to tell you that Terry was a Kinesiology student at my very own school, Simon Fraser University in BC.    He belonged to the school's basketball team.  Terry was diagnosed in 1977 of bone cancer and he lost his right leg to it.  His leg was amputated about six inches above his knee.  He had seen the suffering of other cancer patients, specially of children, and he decided he had to do something to raise awareness and money.  What he came up with was running across Canada.  He called this mega marathon The Marathon of Hope.  

He started running on April 12, 1980 at one of the most Western part of the country in St. John's, Newfoundland.  He ran an average of 26 miles a day, which is the length of a full marathon, every day  nonstop with just one leg!  That is some serious determination.  People congregated in the streets to see him run by their towns and cities and cheer him up.  When he was forced  because of cancer to stop his race in Thunder Bay, Ontario about 4 months and two weeks afterwards he had run  5,373 km.  

He lost the battle to cancer in 1981 but his legacy lives on.  The Terry Fox Foundation has raised over $550 million for cancer research to the date.  D has this dream of running across Canada too.  I think many Canadians do because what Terry Fox started is very fresh in the memories of them all.  There is a Terry Fox run in SFU every September, I would love to participate in the 2012 one.