Terry Fox: Greatest Canadian Hero

27:43So we're going to get behind you in the Marathon of Hope, 4 ,600 mile. How many kilometers is that? Something like 7 ,400 kilometers, I think. All right. starting out in St. John's, Newfoundland, all the way to Vancouver, his home. And they were going to begin, like I said, April 1980. So, you know, we talked about the physical training that happened. There was also the mental game because obviously to undertake something like this, it requires, you know, the head, the heart, the physicality to do it all. And so he realized early on, like, I can't think of this as a 7 ,400 kilometer run. I need to think of it as like one day at a time and then within that day to break it down.

28:29Like maybe I can run the next mile. And then once I finish that mile, I can get another mile. And apparently on days that were really, really tough on him, he'd say, I just need to run to that next stop sign or to that next corner. And he would count telephone poles and do math problems in his head to distract from just the literal physical pain that he was going through. Yeah, which is probably the most difficult thing you can do as a runner, a long-distance runner. Math. So much so, I remember probably 10 years ago, there was an article that profiled a woman who had, I believe it's retrograde amnesia, where you, like, just reset, like, every couple minutes or every few seconds, depending on how your amnesia is.

29:12Yeah. And she was protested by other runners, like professional runners, as having an unfair advantage. Oh, interesting. Because, like, that whole, like, as Iron Maiden put it, the loneliness of a long-distance runner never built up for her. So they were like, that's not fair. But that just goes to show you how awful that the mental part of running is. So much more than the physical part that they were like, this is not fair. And I guess how awful competitive long-distance runners are. Right. Like, what, are you kidding me? Yeah. They're like, have you never heard of Dick Trom in accessibility?

29:52Wow. That's nuts. I can't believe they did that. It's not fair. She can't remember how awful it's been for the past hour. That's pretty much the message here. Wow. All right. Obviously, I'm kidding about long-distance runners. They're great people. Sure. So he was getting dizzy spells. He would get double vision. Um, he figured like, it's just exhaustion, obviously. Uh, he had to get a, um, certificate of health from a cardiologist from the Canadian Cancer Society to even undertake this. And, uh, when he did this, a doctor, uh, diagnosed him with an enlarged heart, um, which is not the most uncommon thing for like an athlete like this.

30:32Yeah. Uh, but the doctor was like, Hey, listen, if you get out there and you're short of breath and you're dizzy, like you've got to stop running. and he just kept, Terry kept quiet about the fact that like, yeah, buddy, that's already happening and I'm pushing through. Right. He said to himself quietly, nuts to that. Exactly. So he's going to start running across the entirety of Canada with an enlarged heart on a prosthetic leg in 1980. And I feel like that's a great place for a break. When we come back, we're going to kick off the Marathon of Hope, Chuck. All right. We'll be right back.

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34:26All right, here we are. It's April 12th, 1980. I have just turned nine years old. I don't know about Terry Fox yet because the movie hasn't been made. I'm coming up on four. See, that's why you didn't know. You didn't know about Robert Duvall on HBO when you were four. Oh, I knew all about Robert Duvall. Big Apocalypse Now fan. For sure. So Terry Fox begins his Marathon of Hope. He started off by dipping his prosthetic leg into the Atlantic Ocean on the coast of Newfoundland. And his goal was, all right, this will be easy. I'll just go out and run about a marathon a day until I reach Vancouver.

35:10and maybe I can raise a million dollars by doing this. So lofty goals, you know, to raise a million bucks. It sounds kind of quaint now, but that, you know, it's a lot of money back then. I mean, it's a lot of money now, obviously. But if you're trying to like raise money for cancer research today, somebody would obviously shoot way higher. But that was a ton of money back then to raise. And he was quiet at the beginning because, you know, no one knew about Terry Fox at the time. So he starts out running and there's like, you know, a couple of photographers there from the local paper and like six or eight people maybe clapping for him.

35:46But and that's how it all started. It did. And he got frustrated really quickly because he had the full support and encouragement of the Canadian Cancer Society. But that didn't translate into actual action on their part. Like for this thing to actually work, people had to know in towns ahead of schedule. Yeah. So that you had volunteers who were coordinating stuff, like getting the word out to the press. Like you needed CCS, like spokespeople talking to local newspapers and TV stations. Like you had to let people know so that they could show up and see him, be moved by what he was doing, and then donate.

36:26Like that's just how it had to go or else he was just doing this for almost nothing. And that's how it went for like the first month. He would get very frustrated when he'd run through a town, sometimes a rather large town. They'd be like, who are you? We haven't heard anything about this. And I think in the first month, like a whole month, all he'd raised was$25 ,000. And so because of this, like he was getting frustrated, not just with the Cancer Society, but just frustrated in general. I mean, like, I can't imagine how tired I would be after one marathon rather than a month of daily marathons, essentially.

37:04And his friend Doug Allward had joined him to drive the van basically slowly with him. And they were living together in the van. So things were getting a touch tense very early on. Yeah, for sure. I definitely remember this from the movie that they were they argued a lot and they thought. Why is that so funny? I just, I don't know. I just imagine Robert Duvall driving the van and turning around saying, pipe down back there. No, no, he comes along later. Okay. So, yeah, they were at each other's throats a lot. You know, Terry was, like you said, a stubborn guy. Apparently he had a bit of a temper and would, you know, he and Doug would get in fights.

37:46It was a lot to undertake, like the pressure this guy was under to bite off something this big. And put himself out there like that. Obviously there was a lot of stress involved. So Terry's brother Daryl joins them in New Brunswick to just sort of add like a third piece to that to help diffuse the tension, I guess, a little bit. You mentioned that, you know, he wasn't getting a lot of attention at first, apparently in Quebec. And this was, by the way, not our experience there. We loved Montreal and we found the people there to be wonderful. But apparently he didn't get any publicity coming into town, didn't raise any money at all in Quebec when he was running through.

38:26and angered a lot of drivers on the road. Apparently, they tried to run him off the road. People were honking at him. He tried running on the highway because it had a shoulder to run on, but the police there kicked him off the highway. So he didn't get a warm reception in Quebec at first. Right, and also didn't raise very much money throughout the whole province. And I have to say, again, I agree with you. The people of Montreal were amazing. I had two Quebecois taxi drivers, one in Vancouver, one in Toronto, and both of them drove like total maniacs. I have to at least say that. They were great guys.

39:06I was talking to them, having fun, but they were maniacs. One of them actually turned around at one point where he's shooting down a right-turn-only lane to cut in in front of a bunch of traffic going quite fast. And he turns around and he's like, how do you like my driving? Wow. All right. Right. So maybe this tracks with his experience with the drivers there, Terry Fox's. Yes. OK. All right. So had it not been for the Toronto Star newspaper and a reporter named Leslie Scrivener, Terry Fox may not have garnered such widespread acclaim because she was drawn to Terry's story. and hats off to the Toronto Star because they really, really got behind him such that they assigned her to write a weekly column called Running with Terry where she went on the road with him basically like reporting on everything that's going on and by the time they get to Toronto all of a sudden he's running from, you know, Quebec his spirits are down no one really even knows what he's doing and he comes into Toronto like almost like a national hero overnight.

40:13Yeah, pretty much. I read an article, I think from the Toronto Star, where they quoted, they said a grandmother age attendee, her name was Edith Cathy, she gave a quote to the paper where she said that she thought she was in love for the first time. It's been a long time since anyone has given me feelings, real feelings. He just seemed to fill your life with something that was missing. And like, that's kind of how he was starting to inspire people. Like he was making people like feel and it very quickly became the whole country and then eventually spilled out of the borders of Canada into the world while he was doing this.

40:54He finally, it did what he had set out to do. Like he had finally gotten to the hearts of Canada and Canadians. And now it was time for them to be like, we want to support you. Here's some money for cancer research. Yeah, for sure. And, you know, he was a young, handsome guy. And so that certainly didn't hurt to capture the hearts of Canadians. And he had a cool name. Yeah. Terry Fox. Great name. Yeah. When he got to Toronto, they asked him to do the kickoff of a football game there. Apparently, when he came on to the field, as the story goes, the stadium announcer says, ladies and gentlemen, and like the rest of it is drowned out because people are just going crazy.

41:35He met Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau. He met Bobby Orr, the great hockey player, and Daryl Sittler, another great hockey player, apparently his idols. They gave him an NHL All-Star jersey. So money starts coming in. Celebrity starts happening. And he realized that this is exactly what he wanted to help raise awareness and money, but it took a toll on him in that now every town he goes to, everyone wants to do an interview with him and everyone wants him to come do an inspirational speaking engagement. So, you know, he's running the equivalent of like close to a marathon a day. Right. So he's physically wrecked.

42:13He has tendinitis in his ankle. He has a dry cough that wouldn't go away. And he is all of a sudden like has to deal like constantly with being interviewed as a national hero, which was awesome, but like really depleting. Not only that, like there were plenty of towns that wanted to like help him with fundraising events. But we need you to come give a speech so the Chamber of Commerce can have their picture taken with you for the local paper. Like that kind of stuff. Not just we're going to support you. We want something from you in return. And so to get that money, he would have to go do that stuff.

42:49And that's a – you basically can't. You can't run a marathon every day and then spend the evening at, like, fundraising events. One fundraising event with zero exercise in a day would wipe me out. Right. Imagine doing a handful of them after you ran a marathon that day. You also ran a marathon the day before and the day before that, et cetera. Yeah, for sure. All of the press wasn't kind to, which really, really stinks. There were some columnists who was like, you know, you're putting your life at risk. like kind of degrading him for that, which is something I don't understand. He, you know, there were like little offhand kind of like quotes they would get from his friend Doug and from his brother about like Terry snapping at them or something.

43:37So sometimes they would paint him as like a tyrant or having like a really bad temper, which apparently had a bit of a temper. But like that's not the lead of the story here, newspapers. So that's really disappointing. Yeah, and it's also one of those things like put yourself in his position. Like, would your patience be thin? Yeah. Good Lord. You know? So he was actually, like, I think after that newspaper article accused him of cheating, he called the newspaper and was like, you better print a retraction. And they did. But I feel like that kind of, like, changed his perspective on things after that.

44:14And it really kind of brought him down. And he was, I don't, it might be overstating it to say, like, he was on the verge of giving up. But he really, his spirits had been, had taken a beating from that experience. And then along comes this little kid, inspiration in a 10-year-old package, a boy named Greg Scott, who has bone cancer himself. And as a matter of fact, his leg was amputated as well. And he idolizes Terry Fox. He had been following him basically ever since the Toronto Star started reporting on him. And he was hoping he could accompany Terry on some of the run. Right, on his bicycle, which is just amazing.

44:55So all of a sudden you've got this one kid with a prosthetic leg, a 10-year-old riding his bike. You got Terry Fox, you know, literally running a marathon a day. So like the press coverage on this is just being amped up even more. And it really obviously inspired Terry, like you were saying, to keep going. at about 3 ,300 miles into his run, Terry started, you know, he had a persistent cough, but he started feeling worse. And he was like, I might have the flu or something, but he was like, I got to push through. He never took a day off in his entire run, we should mention. So he runs 20 miles that day anyway.

45:32The next day he runs 23 and gets to Thunder Bay, Ontario, and is like, the pain in his chest is getting worse and worse. And it spreads to his neck. And he's like, maybe I'm having a heart attack and I'm going to die out here. So, like, I got to go to the hospital. He goes to the hospital and they said, you have a partially collapsed lung. We got to do some x-rays and investigate what's going on. And Terry has a feeling like, I think my cancer has spread. And very sadly, he was right. He was. After a couple of days in the hospital, they came back to him and they said, your cancer is metastasized.

46:08Your bone cancer is now growing in your lungs. And it turned out that he had a golf ball-sized tumor in one lung and a fist-sized tumor in the other lung. Don't forget his large heart that he started out with. And again, running on a prosthetic leg from circa 1980. And this was, I mean, again, like just to have that life-shattering news twice. And not only that, he's like, I can't, this is it. I can't run anymore. Or now I have to stop and treat this cancer. So he called off the run very sadly. He said that I'm going to have to go do this at least for now, but I'm going to try to continue after I beat this cancer.

46:54And, you know, you guys hang in there with me. And just the devastation from having to stop. And he had gone well over the halfway point, which I found perplexing because Ontario is not even the middle province. I think Manitoba is. So I was like, he made it to Thunder Bay, Ontario, but he made it all this way. He had hugged, essentially, the Canadian-American border, and that had a lot of ups and downs and ups and downs. After Thunder Bay, it was basically a straight line out to Vancouver. So when he stopped, and that had to make it all the more frustrating, when he stopped, he was like, I have done the hardest part.

47:34The rest of it is like cake. But he knew that he had to quit. He did. Yeah, very sadly. It was 143 days into the run. He averaged 23.3 miles a day, which is just incredible. Raised$2 million, which is double his goal. But he would end up sort of inadvertently raising a lot more money because in September of 1980, there was a telethon on TV, obviously. And 48 hours, there were, you know, Elton John, John Denver. the great Gordon Lightfoot, of course, and Anne Murray, great Canadians. Glenn Campbell, all these musicians got together and performed at a telethon. It was a five-hour live event, raised$10 million to add to his$2 million that he raised.

48:25And so, I mean, that was$12 million just in 1980 alone. Yeah, and then I think five months after that Marathon of Hope or Telethon of Hope, He achieved a follow-up goal that he had, which was raising a dollar for every Canadian citizen, which came to$24.17 million, Canadian dollars, in 1980 money, which from the calculations I made is equal to just over$93 million Canadian dollars today. Wow. Yeah, and just what he started in April and this was September that he managed to do that. Bye. That's tough. So after months of treatment, he got pneumonia in June of 1981, went into a coma and passed away very sadly on June 28th at the age of 22 years old.

49:23So, as you can imagine, like the Canadian people and everyone following this took this quite hard. And he was immediately memorialized. Even while he was alive, he was memorialized. He was the youngest person to receive the Companion of the Order of Canada, Canada's highest civilian honor. The Order of the Dogwood, which is British Columbia's version of the Companion of the Order of Canada. He was inducted into the Sports Hall of Fame in Canada. All this while he was alive and as the youngest person. And then after he died, it just mushroomed from there, essentially. Yeah, for sure. He's been on a couple of postage stamps in Canada.

50:05I remember this happening, actually, at the 2010 Olympic Games in Vancouver. His mom, Betty, served as one of the eight flag bearers for the Olympic flag opening ceremonies. Very incredible moment. And, you know, he's like I said, everywhere we went in Canada and Q &A, someone like asked us to do a story on Terry Fox. So he's still very much taught about in schools there. His legacy today is probably the Terry Fox run. Yeah. Organized by the Terry Fox Foundation. They separated from the Canadian Cancer Society in 1988. But every year on the second Sunday after Labor Day, which is coming up, kids, adults.

50:48People all across Canada go for a run to raise money for cancer research and to honor Terry. Yeah, just coincidentally, we had no idea, but this episode is going to come out a couple of weeks before the Terry Fox run. So you can go try it yourself. It's September 20th this year. And yeah, just go look up the Terry Fox run and you can find a place near you that you can join a team and do some fundraising and all that good stuff. And it doesn't matter how far you run or how long or if you've ran before. It doesn't matter. It's all just about raising money for cancer research and, of course, honoring Terry Fox for what he did.

51:25Again, over the course of about a year, this kid became one of the greatest Canadians of all time, one of the greatest people of all time. Yeah, for sure. And you don't have to be just in Canada to take part in that. The Terry Fox run happens all over North America and South America. It happens in countries in Europe, Syria, Thailand, New Zealand. It's all over the place. And as of this year, that foundation has reached its one billionth dollar raise for cancer research. That's awesome, man. Incredible. So that's Terry Fox. Heads off, Terry Fox. There's all sorts of footage of him doing his thing on YouTube and all sorts of stories.

52:05And there's at least a couple TV movies, one of which ran frequently on HBO back in the early 80s. Yeah, so go check out more on Terry Fox and be inspired. And in the meantime, I think it's time for Listener Man. We got an email from a guy named Adam about, remember when I was saying the space ghettos for Spice Girls? Yeah. And people are writing in now with more of these fun things, which is if you say this in like this accent, it sounds like this in another accent. Let's hear it. Hey, guys, your tangent of saying words that sound like other words really made me smile because my friends and I used to say these all the time.

52:45I was delighted I hadn't heard your example in the episode before. But here are the ones that we said most often. If you say beer can with a British accent, it sounds like bacon in Jamaican. So beer can. Oh, yeah. I guess. Nice. You got to say it. That wasn't a great British accent. But I see what he's saying. And then Adam says, saying rise up lights in a British accent sounds like razor blades in Australian. So hand me some of those, hand me some of those razor blades. Yeah, that sounded exactly like that. Didn't you think so? Razor blades? I'm really intrigued by this. I feel like we've just cracked into a whole world that I didn't know existed.

53:32Yeah, it's a thing. I can't believe you had never heard of any of these. No, I've led a very sheltered line. Yeah, all right. Well, the doors are open to you now, my friend. I know. The doors of perception have been thrown wide open. And that is from Adam. He says, enjoy listening to you guys on my commute, especially the tangents and long-running jokes. Cheers from Adam. Thanks, Adam. That was great. I would love to hear some more of those, too, so keep them coming, everybody. Yeah, same. And if you want to share something about Terry Fox or some other inspirational person, or you just want to say hi, or you want to say pipe down back there, it doesn't matter.

54:07You can send it in an email to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeart Radio. For more podcasts from iHeart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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55:32Hi, I'm Dr. James Stout. You might know me as a host of the podcast It Could Happen Here. But I'm hosting a brand new show now called Natural Causes, where we explain how going outside is political and look at how we can live together with nature and take care of one another in a world that's on fire. You know, we feel uncomfortable saying something like culture in wildlife, but that's what it is. We're going to explain how a tick can make you sick and how a lizard might be able to help you and what mountain lions can teach us about zombie deer. You can see the very faint outline to the aurora.

56:01What a magical place. Listen to Natural Courses on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.