:: Martin Collis

25 years ago Terry Fox’s ‘Marathon of Hope’ came to an end; at the same time Dick Hoyt and his son ran their first Boston Marathon; 20 years ago Rick Hansen began his wheelchair journey round the world and nearly 10 years ago Lance Armstrong was diagnosed with cancer. What a remarkable species we humans are.

The daylight was heavy with thunder
And the smell of the rain on the wind
Ain’t it just like a human
Here comes the rainbow again.
by Kris Kristofferson
(To read the full lyrics read our Poetry section)

The 1st of September will mark the 25th anniversary of the end of Terry Fox’s attempted cross Canada run. Terry died, but in the words of Robert Earl Keen, “The road goes on forever and the party never ends.”

The story really begins with a car crash in the suburbs of Vancouver when the 18-year-old Terry Fox slammed his Ford Cortina into a half-ton truck. Terry limped away and got on with life, but the bruising around his knee would not go away and within a few months he was diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma, a form of cancer often brought on by trauma, which works its way into bone, muscle and connective tissue. Four months after the accident Terry’s right leg was amputated 6” above the knee. Within a few months he was playing wheelchair basketball with Rick Hansen on a team named the Cablecars that won the Canadian championship the following year. This was clear evidence that Terry and Rick were athletes, competitors and winners.

Hard work can build character, but adversity reveals it. Out of a smashed car and a hospital operating room emerged a one-legged young man who almost defined the word ‘hero’, and changed the way many people thought about cancer and amputees. Wheelchair basketball was great but Terry had a bigger vision, he was going to run/hop across Canada. What I love about the concept and beginnings of the run in Newfoundland was that it was so low-tech and non-corporate. There were no cell phones and emails, no big corporate sponsors, just Terry and a few friends and family using pay phones to try and drum up a bit of publicity in upcoming towns. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.

Somewhere along the way word began to leak out about the one-legged man and his Marathon of Hope. The crowds started to build and a cynical nation believed Terry when he said, “I’m not doing this to become rich or famous. One of the problems with our world is that people are getting greedy and selfish.” The lonely runner with one camper van now started getting police escorts and other runners for company and the crowds got progressively bigger at the end of each day.

Quoting from Doug Coupland’s book “Terry”, “Nobody—nobody in recorded history—had ever run this many consecutive marathons, so there were no examples to learn from. Terry had shin splints, he lost many of his toenails, his knee was inflamed, his stump was endlessly bruised and chaffed and developed many cysts He lost weight, got dizzy spells and saw double—but he kept all this to himself.”

The Marathon of Hope did not end with a huge celebration on the West Coast but with coughing and chest pains in Thunder Bay. The cancer was back and this time it took more than a leg, it claimed all of Terry Fox except his spirit.

Terry Fox memorial Thunder Bay

I’m reminded of the song,

John Brown’s body lies a-mouldering in the grave,
But his soul goes marching on.

The soul and spirit of Terry Fox won’t die and 25 years later hundreds of thousands of people take part in Terry Fox runs. A mountain bears his name, there are many Terry Fox schools and now our one-dollar coin shows his image, the first Canadian coin ever struck that shows a person other than a king or queen.

Terry dreamed of raising a dollar for every Canadian. He has exceeded that goal many, many times over and cancer research has been the beneficiary.

Doug Coupland’s biography of Terry Fox, titled “Terry” is available through Amazon.com and Amazon.ca The author is donating all of his royalties from the book directly to the Terry Fox Foundation. The publisher, Douglas and McIntyre, is making a contribution to the foundation by paying royalties at double the normal rate for every copy of the book that is sold.

by Rick Reilly (Written for Sports Illustrated)
(Thanks to Bill Dickerson for sending this terrific story to us).

I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans. Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take them to on vacations.

But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.

Eighty-five times he's pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars—all in the same day.

Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike. Makes taking your son bowling look a little lame, right?


And what has Rick done for his father? Not much—except save his life.

This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.

"He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life," Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. "Put him in an institution."

But the Hoyts weren't buying it. They noticed the way Rick's eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. "No way," Dick says he was told. "There's nothing going on in his brain." "Tell him a joke," Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain.

Rigged up with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. First words? "Go Bruins!" And after a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick pecked out, "Dad, I want to do that." Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described "porker" who never ran more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried. "Then it was me who was handicapped," Dick says. "I was sore for two weeks."

That day changed Rick's life. "Dad," he typed, "when we were running, it felt like I wasn’t disabled anymore!”

And that sentence changed Dick’s life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon. “No way,” Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren’t quite a single runner, and they weren’t quite a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.

Then somebody said, “Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?” How’s a guy who never learned to swim and hadn’t ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried. Now they’ve done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii. It must be a buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don’t you think? Hey, Dick, why not see how you’d do on your own? “No way,” he says. Dick does it purely for “the awesome feeling” he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.

This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992—only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don’t keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time. “No question about it,” Rick types. “My dad is the Father of the Century.”

And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. “If you hadn’t been in such great shape,” one doctor told him, “you probably would’ve died 15 years ago.” So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other’s life.

Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care) and works in Boston, and Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father’s Day.

That night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy. “The thing I’d most like,” Rick types, “is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once.”

For more information about Dick and Rick Hoyt go to www.teamhoyt.com

Rick’s introduction to paralysis was instant and catastrophic and like Terry Fox it began with a road accident. The athletic 15-year old was riding in the back of a pickup truck, which went off the road and flipped, breaking the back, but not the spirit, of Rick Hansen. Today Rick tells people about the progress in spinal cord injury treatment, “When I was injured in 1973, only about 30% of people with spinal cord injuries had a chance of any level of recovery at all. Today it’s 70%.”

Rick and I spoke to the teachers of Williams Lake School District where Rick had been a student and he personally thanked the teachers who helped convince him that life was not over and that a small town boy from British Columbia could still make a big impact even without his legs. His phys. ed. teacher became a powerful advocate in helping him to be the first paraplegic student ever accepted into Physical Education at the University of British Columbia. He more than justified his selection by winning 3 world championships in wheelchair marathons and 5 Canadian championships at wheelchair basketball. Terry Fox was a basketball teammate and Terry’s ‘Marathon of Hope’ became an inspiration and catalyst for Rick’s imagination. He was pretty sure he could make the cross-Canada trip in his wheelchair, but what if he went right round the globe?

I don’t have enough adjectives or space to describe the pain, problems and injuries that Rick encountered. His ‘Man in Motion’ odyssey was not ‘Around the World in 80 Days’ but around the world in 2 years, 2 months and 2 days.

« Rick at the Great Wall

When you launch yourself into the unknown, by definition you have no idea what the outcomes will be. The chances are good that there’ll be problems, but the chances are better that those will be positive life-changing experiences. So it was for Rick. His physiotherapist on the journey, Amanda, became his wife with whom he has had three children. He has become a sought after speaker and a passionate advocate for people with disabilities. The ‘Man in Motion’ tour raised enormous amounts of money for spinal cord research and the ‘Rick Hansen Wheels in Motion’ drive continues to do so.

Two teenage boys from small town in BC, both involved in road accidents. Terry Fox failed to complete his run across Canada, Rick failed in his attempt to walk again, but those ‘failures’ have become glorious success stories. Because of them and others like them we now look differently at people with so-called ‘disabilities’. Advances in research and medicine are making some cancers ever more treatable and it’s my belief that we’ll see spinal cord repair and regeneration in my lifetime. Rick Hansen might not walk again, but because of him people in his children’s generation will. One more thing, a small item in the newspaper recently said that the name of Rick Hansen is being talked about as the next Governor General of Canada. That would be another first. We’d better make sure Rideau Hall is totally wheelchair accessible.

What can you say about Lance that hasn’t been written? As I write this he’s half way through the 2005 Tour de France and he wears the yellow jersey, the Golden Fleece to which every rider aspires.

The LiveStrong yellow bracelets that Lance uses to raise money for cancer research have now sold around 50 million. Go Lance! Allez, allez, allez!!