Terry Fox was born on July 28th 1958. He was really good at sports when he was at school. When he was 19 years old, he found out that he had cancer in his leg. The doctors told him that they would have to cut off his leg and he had to take very strong medicine. They gave him a fake leg made of plastic and metal, and Terry Fox learned to walk and run on that. A fake leg did not stop him. Terry Fox played for a wheelchair basketball team.
Terry Fox understood that it was important to learn about cancer so that doctors could find a cure for it. He wanted to let other people know about this. He decided to set a goal to run across Canada to make people see how important it was to learn about cancer, and raise as much money as he could. He started to run the Marathon of Hope on April 12th 1980. He called it that because he had a lot of hope that there would be a cure for cancer. As he was running, he became sicker and had to stop after running for 143 days. He died one month before his 23rd birthday. There is a statue of him in Niagara Falls. Every year, people run and raise money to give to find a cure for cancer. Terry Fox ran so bravely so that people would not get cancer. I really think that he ran for me and my friends and my family.
Before we did our Terry Fox run at my school, we had to do some training. For the training, we ran around the school field for practice. On the first day we did 1 lap. On the second day we did 2 laps. On the third day, we ran 3 laps and on the fourth day, we did the actual 1km route. The Terry Fox run was on the fifth day. It was so exhausting! I could hardly sprint on the third day. One of my friends sprinted all of the laps on all of the days. She is so fast!
We also had to bring in Toonies to raise money for the Terry Fox run. We had set a goal of a lot of money, and each time we got closer to the goal, a Grade 6 student or our principal could colour a part of a picture of Terry Fox. We didn't reach our goal, but we still raised a lot of money. We gave that money to find a cure for cancer.
On Friday September 30th, my school had the Terry Fox Run. We had to run laps and each lap was 1km long. At school, that morning, we were given a sticker and we had to write who we were running for. I ran for every adult who had cancer, and who also has kids. One of my friends also ran for the same group of people. Each time we completed a lap, we got a tally mark on our sticker. Before we went outside for our run, we had a pep rally to get us warmed up. We did a bunch of stretches and simple exercises to get our hearts pumping blood and oxygen around our body. This year, I ran 5km, in half an hour. Last year, I had run 4km, so I was very happy this year to have run more. I think I want to set a new goal for next year!
