This week, Manitoba celebrated a long weekend known as Terry Fox Day. This icon of vision and determination was born in Winnipeg, but grew up in British Columbia. If you are not familiar with his story, you can find it here.
In brief, Terry Fox was a young athlete who had his leg amputated due to cancer in 1977. When he realised that cancer research was the key to improving the longevity of cancer patients, he undertook to run across Canada, the second largest country in the world, to support the Canadian Cancer Foundation.
He dipped his artificial leg in the Atlantic Ocean at Halifax, and started running the equivalent of a full marathon every day. His fame grew as time went on, and he was highly successful in his fundraising. However, he had to abandon his Marathon of Hope just west of Thunder Bay, where this statue now stands, because his cancer had returned and spread to his lungs. He died nine months later, on June 28 1981, one month before his 23rd birthday.
The first annual Terry Fox Run was held in September 1981. In January 2020, the Terry Fox Foundation announced that $800 million had been raised in his name.
Terry Fox has become a legend – a symbol of persistence in the face of pain and doubt. We tend to place people like that on a pedestal, to endow them with a superhuman aura. There’s no question that his determination was unusual – even before the amputation, he fought his way onto his school basketball team, despite being only five feet tall at the time. When he was invited onto the Canadian national wheelchair basketball team, he helped them win three championships. He was a young man who knew what he wanted, and took his own desires seriously.
Do you think that people like Terry Fox are that different from you and me? What makes them persevere against obstacles that most of us would consider impossible to overcome?
My mentor, Ray Higdon, would tell you that it’s because of their vision. Terry Fox had a vision to raise $1 from each Canadian (24 million people at the time) for cancer research, and he was not prepared to let anything come between him and that vision. His fight against cancer was intensely personal, and it fuelled him on his epic run.
As Viktor Frankl famously said, “Those who have a ‘why’ to live, can bear with almost any ‘how’.”
Do you have that kind of compelling vision? It is not necessary to suffer the kind of pain that Terry Fox did, in order to see a vision of making the world a better place. Most people are not capable of running a marathon every day, even with two legs. I certainly am not.
However, we each have our own gifts and ways of contributing to the world. If you find yourself discouraged and are tempted to abandon your vision, think of the indomitable Terry Fox, and keep going.