It was Rick Hansen who invited Terry to get back into sports and join a wheelchair basketball team. (Rick and Terry were of the same mold; later Rick, a paraplegic, would push his wheelchair around the world, and he never failed to give credit to Terry, the friend who inspired him.)

Terry tackled this new challenge with his usual gusto. He made himself strong pushing his wheelchair along the sea wall at Stanley Park in Vancouver. Or he’d find steep mountains and push himself up unruly logging roads. He pushed himself until his hands bled.

Two years after his operation, Terry started a running program. The first half miles he ran in the dark, so no one could see him. But one of his coaches from junior high, Bob McGill, who had since overcome cancer himself, heard the steady one-two thump of Terry’s good leg and the thud of his artificial leg, long before he could see his wobbly frame in the darkness.

Terry trained for 15 months, running 3,159 miles, running until his stump was raw and bleeding, running every day for 101 days, until he could run 23 miles a day. He took one day off at Christmas, only because his mother asked him. Once, just before Christmas, when he had run only a half mile, the bottom half of his artificial leg snapped in two pieces, and Terry crashed to the pavement. He picked up the two parts, tucked them under his arm, stuck out his thumb and hitch-hiked home. There, he clamped the two parts together and ran another five miles.

When Terry told his mother Betty, he intended to run across Canada, in her no-nonsense way she told him he was crazy. He said he was going to run no matter what she thought. Then Betty told her husband Rolly, and he, knowing his son so well, simply said, “When?”

When Terry approached the Canadian Cancer Society about his run, its administrators were skeptical about his success. They doubted he could raise $1 million and as a test of his sincerity, told him to earn some seed money and find some corporate sponsors. They believed they’d never hear from him again.

But Terry persevered, earning sponsors and the promise of promotion from the cancer society. On April 12, 1980, he dipped his artificial leg in the murky waters of St John’s harbour and set off on the greatest adventure of his life.

“I loved it,” Terry said. “I enjoyed myself so much and that was what other people couldn’t realize. They thought I was going through a nightmare running all day long. “People thought I was going through hell. Maybe I was partly, but still I was doing what I wanted and a dream was coming true and that, above everything else, made it all worthwhile to me. Even though it was so difficult, there was not another thing in the world I would have rather been doing. “I got satisfaction out of doing things that were difficult. It was an incredible feeling. The pain was there, but the pain didn’t matter. But that’s all a lot of people could see; they couldn’t see the good that I was getting out of it myself.” And the people of Canada were latching on to Terry’s dream. They wept as he ran by, fists clenched, eyes focussed on the road ahead, his awkward double-step and hop sounding down the highway, the set of his jaw, unflinching, without compromise. The look of courage. As a woman in Toronto, Canada’s largest city said, “He makes you believe in the human race again.”

He’d start before dawn every morning, running in shorts and a T-shirt printed with a map of Canada. He wasn’t ashamed of his disability. Children were curious about his artificial leg. How did it work? What happens when it breaks?

Donations poured in. Reading of Terry’s goals, Four Seasons’ President, Isadore Sharp, was also caught up in the dream of the Marathon of Hope. He pledged $10,000 to the marathon and challenged 999 other Canadian corporations to do the same.

If $1 million toward cancer research was within reach, why not $1 from every Canadian; why not a goal of $23 million? The money came in many ways. People waited for hours on the roadside to watch Terry pass. Sometimes a stranger would press a $100 bill into his hand as he ran by.

One day in southern Ontario, they collected $20,000 on the highway. A man in Hamilton sat in a vat of banana lemon custard and raised $912 for the Marathon of Hope. In Gravenhurst, the heart of Ontario’s cottage country, with a population of 8,000, they raised more than $14,000. A musician, apparently without cash, handed Terry his $500 guitar.

Throughout his run and even in the months before, Terry neglected his medical appointments. No one could force him to see a doctor for a check-up. He said he didn’t believe the cancer would come back. Earlier, when he’d missed his appointments for x-rays at the cancer clinic in Vancouver he said, “Every time I went down, I was shivering and it wasn’t because I was cold. I was afraid.”