I was watching my favorite show, That’s Incredible! That night, they were featuring the story of a young Canadian named Terry Fox. He was nineteen years old when he was diagnosed with cancer. They found a tumor in his right leg, and his leg had to be amputated six inches above his knee. While in the hospital recovering, Terry watched children even younger than he was die from their own illnesses.

What Terry chose to do next was the most surprising thing I’d ever seen. After enduring eighteen months of chemotherapy and witnessing so much death and tragedy around him, he should have been reduced. As he surely must have been thinking about his own mortality, he was supposed to retreat, curl into a ball, and protect the precious little he had left. And who would have blamed him if that was what he did? Instead, Terry did the exact opposite. He made the astonishing decision to run, and not just for a day, or a week, but from one end of Canada to the other. It was a new marathon every day, for thousands of miles.

I pressed my face against the television, watching Terry hobble mile after mile in what was called his Marathon of Hope. This was before the days of high-tech prosthetics. His clunky, old-fashioned prosthetic leg gave him a herky-jerky gait, as he did an awkward double step, and then a hop on his good left leg as his prosthetic right foot went back and then swung forward again, almost like he was skipping. The look on his face was one of exhaustion mixed with determination. In his eyes, I sensed something I could only describe as a light that seemed the source of his intensity and power.

On day 143—after running an average of twenty-six miles a day for over four months and a total of 3,339 miles through six provinces with crowds cheering him on—Terry was forced to stop. Cancer had invaded his lungs, causing him to cough and gasp for air as he ran. Terry cried as he told the crowd of reporters that he wouldn’t be able to finish, but through his tears, he said, “I’ll fight. I promise I won’t give up.”

Terry Fox died seven months after he stopped running. It wasn’t fair. He’d only gotten twenty-two years on Earth. But in that short window, he had made a decision to run, and that decision had elevated an entire nation. Instead of shrinking away, Terry had gotten bigger. He had lived more than he had died. Donations to his Marathon of Hope fund poured in and reached $24 million, equal to a dollar for every Canadian citizen.