He Ran Close to a Marathon Every Day, on One Leg — For 143 Days. (True Story)

On 12 April 1980 a 21-year-old dipped his artificial leg into the Atlantic off Newfoundland, filled two bottles with seawater, and set out to run the width of Canada so he could pour them into the Pacific on the other side. Close to a marathon a day. On one leg. Three years earlier Terry Fox had been a sports-mad teenager in British Columbia who made his basketball team on sheer persistence. Then came the pain in his right knee and a diagnosis of bone cancer; his leg was amputated fifteen centimetres above the knee at eighteen. It was the children's cancer ward that changed him — the suffering that research money could actually fix. He trained in secret until his stump bled, then trained more. His gait was unmistakable: two hops on the good leg, a stride on the steel one, roughly forty kilometres a day through Atlantic sleet, Quebec headwinds and Ontario heat, with no rest days. At first almost nobody noticed. Then Canada caught on, towns emptied onto the highways, and thousands ran beside him. One hundred and forty-three days. 5,373 kilometres. Outside Thunder Bay the coughing started. The cancer was in his lungs. He gave a press conference from a stretcher and promised he would finish if he could, and he died in June 1981, a month before his 23rd birthday. Canada refused to let the run end. The Terry Fox Run is now held every year in dozens of countries, and in February 2026 the Terry Fox Foundation announced it had surpassed $1 billion raised for cancer research. He asked for a dollar from every Canadian. He got generations of them. 00:00 The Marathon of Hope 0:33 A Diagnosis, A Decision 1:28 The Run Begins 2:21 143 Days, 5,373 Kilometres 2:47 The Cancer Returns 3:08 One Billion Dollars Later 3:23 Tomorrow: The Cellist of Sarajevo Every word of this story is true. Sources: Terry Fox Foundation — https://terryfox.org/terrys-story/ Terry Fox Foundation, $1 billion milestone — https://terryfox.org/media-centre/ter... The Canadian Encyclopedia — https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en... Visuals in this video are AI recreations of real people and real events. The story is verified. If it was worth five minutes, subscribe and come back for the next one. #truestory #terryfox #marathonofhope #canada #thehappinessdose