Darrell Fox’s day used to start at 4:30 in the morning, in a van that smelled like a marathon runner’s shoes, because that’s exactly what it was. He told me about it when we chatted for the Season 3 premiere of the PULSE Community Podcast, forty-six years removed from the Marathon of Hope and just weeks from seeing it on the big screen for the first time.
He was seventeen in the spring of 1980 when Darrell joined the road crew in Saint John, New Brunswick, watching his older brother run a marathon a day on an artificial leg, and doing the one job a seventeen-year-old is actually qualified for: reading the room, knowing when Terry needed to just be a brother again instead of a man on a mission.
That footage of Terry, the real, unguarded version of him, sat in storage for four decades until a director named Sean Lennard went looking for four specific reels and came back with ninety-three. The result is a documentary called Run, Terry, Run, narrated in part by Darrell himself alongside Doug Alward and biographer Leslie Scrivener, with a song from Bryan Adams woven through it. It opens in Cineplex theatres October 9th, and Darrell told me his plan is simple: go to as many screenings as he can and just watch the audience take it in.
The numbers Darrell rattled off are staggering on their own – more than a billion dollars raised for cancer research, 600 runs across the country every September, run entirely by volunteers with no staff and no budget.
Darrell said of his brother that limitations are self-imposed. “Terry wasn’t a gifted athlete; he just never stopped trying.”
September 20th is this year’s Terry Fox Run.
You can hear the full conversation, including Darrell’s take on the new 20-year agreement placing the Marathon of Hope archive with the Royal BC Museum on The PULSE Community Podcast at: https://bit.ly/S3EP01PulsePodcast
The PULSE Community website: ThePulseCommunity.ca.
Peter McCully is a multimedia creator and podcast host based in Parksville, BC. https://mccullymedia.ca/category/blog/