Terry Fox Wore Out Nine Shoes. All Nine Were Left Shoes.

Across 143 days and 5,373 kilometres, Terry Fox wore out nine running shoes. All nine were left shoes. The one on the artificial leg came off the road outside Thunder Bay in September 1980 in roughly the condition it went on in at St. John's in April, because an artificial foot does not care how far you make it go.

That detail tells you more about the Marathon of Hope than the map does. The run is the part everyone knows. The parts that explain how a twenty-one-year-old was capable of it had already happened before he dipped his leg in the Atlantic.

The article he was given the night before the amputation

Fox was diagnosed with osteosarcoma in 1977. The night before the surgery that took his right leg, his high school basketball coach Terri Fleming handed him a copy of Runner's World containing an article about Dick Traum, an American amputee who in 1976 had become the first to run the New York City Marathon on a prosthesis.

Fox later said that article was the origin of the Marathon of Hope. Which means the idea arrived the night before he lost the leg, from a coach who evidently understood exactly what kind of person he was handing it to.

He was a national champion in a sport nobody mentions

Between 1977 and 1980 Fox played wheelchair basketball for a team called the Cable Cars. He won national championships in 1978 and 1979, took three national titles in total, and was named an all-star by the North American Wheelchair Basketball Association in 1980.

Read that year again. He was named an all-star in a national sport in the same year he ran across most of a continent. He was not a sick young man who attempted something athletic. He was a competitive athlete the entire time, in two sports at once, and only one of them ever gets brought up.

The gait was not a limp

The prosthetic leg he ran on was built with springs, and the springs needed a moment to reset between strides. So every second step, Fox hopped on his left leg to buy that moment. Hop, step, hop, step, for close to a marathon a day, for four and a half months.

That is the whole explanation for the nine left shoes. The right side of his body was carried. The left side did the work of two, twenty-six miles a day, and the road took the difference out of the shoe.

Cancer reached his lungs and stopped him on 1 September 1980. He died on 28 June 1981, at twenty-two. He had asked for one dollar from every Canadian, and by February of that year the Marathon of Hope had raised over $24.17 million.

Why he ends up on a shirt

The Terry Fox tee draws him mid-stride in the gait everybody recognizes, prosthetic leg rendered plain with no softening, ringed by the words Marathon of Hope. Plain is the correct register. He was extremely unsentimental about the leg and would probably have found any other treatment irritating.

He never finished. That has been described as the tragedy of the story for forty-five years, and it is worth considering that it might be the design. He covered two-thirds of a country and then handed the rest to everyone watching, and they have been running it for him every September since. Over a billion dollars has been raised in his name, which is roughly forty times what he asked for.

Related: the rest of the Canadian shelf, or the full catalogue.