Terry Fox Run set for Upper Queen's Park on Sunday
Back for another year, Stratford's Terry Fox Run is nearing a significant milestone – $400,000 raised since the city first held the event in 1986, five years after the death of its namesake.
Published Sep 11, 2024 • 2 minute read
Back for another year, Stratford’s Terry Fox Run is nearing a significant milestone – $400,000 raised since the city first held the event in 1986, five years after the death of its namesake.
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Just $4,000 away from that mark, the annual Stratford event will be held on Sunday, one of many across Canada and around the world. Now more than four decades after Fox’s 1980 Marathon of Hope ended in Thunder Bay after travelling 5,373 kilometres, more than $900 million has been raised for cancer research in his memory.
Rena Spevack has been organizing the local run for more than two decades after being asked by the provincial chapter of the Terry Fox Foundation to come on board. With no one else to organize the local run at that time, there was a real risk of not having a Stratford edition of the fundraiser, Spevack said.
“When faced with that, I went, ‘that’s not acceptable.’ . . . They gave me a lot of support. I got a bunch of people that I knew together, and we just started, and then I’ve been doing it ever since,” she said.
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The memory of the Fox’s marathon and his dream of finding a cure lives on for those who saw him pass through Stratford, Spevack added.
“For the people who remember him, that was the big deal,” she said. “I think the whole story of Terry Fox is just something that Canadians are really proud of. He was quite the young man. He had an amazing story and just wanted to do something good for people suffering from cancer. . . . You can’t let this dream die because he died.”
Local schools have have also taken up the mantle, raising $14,000 last year alone.
“I’m just so happy that schools really picked it up. There are individual teachers at each school that really run with it and, you know, organize it and make an event so that the kids can hear the story. They don’t want Canadians to forget,” Spevack said.
Sunday’s run is slated for 8:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Upper Queen’s Park near the picnic tables. The event is meant to be non-competitive, with no set course or minimum fundraising required.
“The whole spirit of it . . . it was not intended to be competitive. There are some place that do more like a timed race (but) it was never intended to be like that. We never have had that in Stratford,” Spevack said.
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