He Ran a Marathon a Day, on One Leg, for 143 Days

Terry Fox was eighteen when they took his right leg. Osteosarcoma, 1977.

Three years later, on 12 April 1980, he put his artificial leg in the Atlantic at St John’s, Newfoundland, and started running west. The plan was the entire width of Canada, to raise money for cancer research.

He ran about forty-two kilometres a day. A marathon. Every day. On a 1970s prosthesis, which meant a hop-step gait that drove the impact of two legs through one, on public roads, in whatever weather arrived — and for the first months mostly without crowds, because hardly anyone had heard of him yet.

He kept it up for 143 days and 5,373 kilometres, until the cancer reached his lungs and stopped him outside Thunder Bay on 1 September 1980. He died the following June, aged twenty-two.

The number is not the remarkable part. This is: he told a radio station that he found life more rewarding and challenging after losing the leg, and that he would not let anyone pity him.

It would be easy to file that as a brave face assembled for a microphone. The dates make it hard to. In October 1979 — before a single kilometre, before anyone was watching, while the whole thing was still a plan a one-legged twenty-one-year-old had told almost nobody about — he wrote this:

“Somewhere the hurting must stop… and I was determined to take myself to the limit for this cause.”

But the distance is not the achievement, and neither is the courage. This is the achievement, in his own words, from the road:

“Today we got up at 4:00 am. As usual, it was tough.”

As usual. Four in the morning, one hundred and forty-three times, and the honest admission that it never once got easier. On what the running actually cost him, again in his own words:

“I have to really concentrate to ignore the pain and keep going. Sometimes I’m actually crying while I’m running but I just don’t think about it.”

And on the cysts and abrasions that came of driving two legs’ worth of impact through one:

“If I ran to a doctor every time I got a little cyst or abrasion I’d still be in Nova Scotia. Or else I’d never have started.”

That is the part that transfers. Nobody reading this is going to run 5,373 kilometres. Everybody reading this woke up this morning not feeling like it, about something considerably smaller, and had the same decision in front of them that he had at four o’clock in the dark.

We have grown comfortable pushing things to later on the grounds that we do not feel like them now. He had better reasons than any of us to make that trade, and one hundred and forty-three consecutive mornings he declined it.

He was not waiting to feel ready, or well, or supported, and he never saw a dollar of what he started do its work. He had worked out what the time he had was for, and he spent it at four in the morning, in the dark, not feeling like it.

He got up and did the distance.

Then he got up and did it again.