The night before doctors amputated his cancerous leg,
The night before doctors amputated his cancerous leg, 18-year-old Terry Fox read about a runner who'd finished the New York Marathon with a prosthetic leg. The next morning, Fox showed the article to his nurse, telling her, "Someday I'm going to do something like that." And he did. Inspired by the cancer patients he met in his 16 months of chemotherapy treatment, Fox decided to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research. When he began marathon training, he could barely run half a mile on his artificial leg. He worked with a prosthetist to modify the leg to suit long-distance running, and by April 1980, he was finally strong enough to begin his "Marathon of Hope." For 143 days, he ran, starting around 4:30 a.m. and not stopping until after 7 p.m. By the time Fox was forced to end his journey because his cancer had spread to his lungs, he'd run the equivalent of nearly 130 marathons. And while Terry Fox died of cancer just a year after beginnin...