Agree 100% about honouring the great Terry Fox!
When I was in grade one I went to a school called Marklee Campus. This was the 1980-81 school year. It was a small school - only kindergarten, grade one and grade two - in the middle of nowhere somewhere in Markham Ontario. That summer Terry Fox had been running his “Marathon of Hope†a country wide run in the effort to raise money for Cancer research. It was due to Cancer that he had his right leg amputated. He ran with an artificial prosthetic leg from Newfoundland all the way to Thunder Bay, before having to abandon the run due to terminal illness.
During the school year, I can’t remember if it was in the fall or spring, the staff decided to hold a Terry Fox run at our little school. But it was held in an interesting way. Every day at lunch time or recess you could run loops of the school field, which I remember to be quite big, but probably were very small in reality. Every time you completed one loop of the field a lady, Ms. Dixon I think it was, would give you a wood popsicle stick. At the end of the recess or lunch hour you went up to your homeroom teacher and gave her all the popsicle sticks you had collected. This went on for I think a few weeks. I remember that the most I could do was eight loops. So for a six year old kid to run that many loops, the loops must have been very short.
There was this tall oriental kid, maybe Lawrence was his name, he always would go up to the teacher with nine, everyday. When me and my friends would be logging our four to eight he would be ahead of us en route to nine. So one day I got enough courage to go up to him and say “can you show me how to do nine?†I remember clearly him saying “just stay with meâ€. I’ll never forget how easy it was to run nine that day. I went up to friends later and told them how many loops I had done much to their amazement. When the run had finished and all the cumulative popsicle stick totals were calculated I had placed in the third category. I remember the first category was 100 sticks or more. Only a few grade two’s got that.
That early running experience stayed with me in a big way. I will never forget it. It was so simple yet so influential. I always enjoyed running from then on and was enthusiastic about participating in it. Nine years later, at the end of grade ten, I joined the Brampton Track club. Fittingly, the track that the club trained at was called the Terry Fox Track and Field Stadium.