Even rain can't damped spirits at Nelson's Terry Fox Run
By The Nelson Daily Sports
By Bruce Fuhr,
The Nelson Daily Staff
If this keeps up Terry Fox organizer Mike Hurley is going to pray for rain every year.
Close to 100 dedicated runners, joggers, walkers, bikers and mothers pushing children in strollers braved cold, rainy conditions to keep the drive to defeat cancer alive at the 30th annual Nelson Terry Fox run Sunday.
“I’m sure people woke up this morning, looked outside and said I’m not going to go because it’s raining,” Hurley explained. “But Terry had to get up and go run in the rain, so there they were . . ..”
“I was kind of moved a little bit that all those people would come in the rain,” he added.”
The Terry Fox provincial organizers told Hurley that most runs in the province were affected by inclement weather.
Still the Nelson run was able to raise $4,400 toward cancer research.
Terry Fox, starting on Canada’s eastern seaborne, ran a marathon every day for 143 days.
Every day, through the pain, he got up and ran another day — an amazing journey that captured Canadians from Coast to Coast.
Fox called it “the Marathon of Hope.”
At the end of his run, after 5, 373 kilometers, Terry Fox was forced to stop.
The cancer had spread and eventually took Terry from us in June 1981.
To date, more than $500 million has been raised worldwide for cancer research in the name of Terry Fox with $.87 going from every dollar raised going directly to cancer research.
The Terry Fox Foundation has made strides toward getting the work that researchers are doing to the doctors and patients more quickly, rather than letting things get tied up in red-tape.
First participants to cross the finish line during the five-kilometer run were Grade 6 runner Kieran Marchand from Nelson and Warren Fink of Edmonton.
sports@thenelsondaily.com
