It’s that time of year again to tie up your sneakers, strap on your rollerblades, or hop on your bike. The Terry Fox Run returns to Elmira for its 25th year on September 14.
Organizer Kathy Bauman said it will follow the same route as previous years. It starts at 49 Industrial Dr. in and you can do one, two, five, or 10 kilometres. Registration is at noon and the run begins at 1 p.m.
“We have in 25 years in Elmira raised $249,927, which is pretty good,” Bauman said.
The Terry Fox Run is the longest running charity fun run in Canada and there’s no minimum donation required to participate.
“We average under 100 people. Last year we had about 71 people which does include our volunteers,” she said, noting the most raised in a single year was $16,000 in 2000. “We’d love to see more people.”
She said some people will just ask coworkers, friends, and family or go door to door for donations. Others make a donation on their own. Though the Elmira run may be small, Bauman said they’ve managed to stay in the top 20 of funds raised per participant for a number of years.
“Most people do the whole 10 km. They run, they walk, they bike, they take their dog, they rollerblade,” she said.
For those unfamiliar with his story, Fox’s right leg was amputated in 1977 from osteosarcoma and he embarked on the Marathon of Hope, running the equivalent of a marathon a day to raise funds and awareness for cancer research.
The cancer spread to his lungs by the time he reached Thunder Bay from St. John’s, Newfoundland and he was forced to stop. He died on June 28, 1981 at 22 years of age.
“We also have a free barbecue that day that the Optimist Club is wonderful enough to come out and cook for us,” Bauman said. “When people come back we have a penny raffle and larger raffle as well with donations from businesses in Wellesley Township and Woolwich Township.”
Nationally, the money raised in the Terry Fox Run’s 34 years has helped with a wide range of cancer research, including ovarian cancer, prostate cancer, oral cancer, and childhood leukemia.
She said advances in early lung cancer detection funded by the run were significant last year.
“The money made a huge difference in all these different hospitals across Ontario from Brock University Hospital… the hospitals in London, the Institute of Cancer Research, all of those,” she said. “It went all over there for the research that made the huge difference.”
The money raised last year went to 75 different research projects across Ontario.
Bauman notes the Elmira run has been growing in recent years because of social media. She says people are still recognizing his name, and often children are more familiar with his legacy than some adults.
“He’s a part of history,” she said of Terry Fox.
The Canadian Museum of History in Gatineau will be opening a memorabilia next June. The Fox family is donating memorabilia from Terry’s run across Canada in 1980.
She said it was important for her to help keep the Terry Fox Run going in Elmira because of the effect cancer has had on her family’s life.
“My husband and I both have family members who have been touched by cancer and because of research survived,” Bauman said. “It feels good giving back and being able to help, to make a difference and know that we can make a huge difference and keep fighting and know that without research nothing would change.”
“We’re helping to forge a future for our children. Other people can survive these types of cancer that 34 years ago they couldn’t.”
