Racing for Remembrance

 This article appears in the September issue of Impact magazine. Photo: Terry Fox

By Peter McKenzie-Brown

When we lose someone, our humanity often takes the form of finding ways to help finish the unfinished work of those who are gone. Many of us participate in events to honour our heroes, to recognize the fallen, to protest the senseless waste of human life, to reflect on the loss of friends and family. Perhaps these efforts are an attempt by the living to follow the counsel of poet Dylan Thomas: “Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

There is often a connection between athletic achievement and our remembrance of the tragically lost and the senselessly killed. The connection between our memories and our athletic achievements is often a source of good. It is increasingly harnessed to raise funds for health-related causes – from diabetes and heart disease to leukemia, lymphoma, Hodgkin’s disease and myeloma. First among these fund-raising causes, of course, is the scourge of cancer – a disease about half of us will experience in our lifetimes.

Our Heroes
The power of remembrance as an athletic motivator was expressed superbly by a young man who was possibly the greatest player in football history. The year was 1920. Here’s how Knute Rockne, the football coaching legend of Notre Dame, recorded the story.

George Gipp lay in his hospital bed dying at the age of 25. “I’ve got to go, Rock,” he said. “It’s all right. I’m not afraid. Some time, Rock, when the team is up against it, when things are wrong and the breaks are beating the boys, ask them to go in there with all they’ve got and win just one for the Gipper. I don’t know where I’ll be then, Rock. But I’ll know about it, and I’ll be happy.” Eight years later, Rockne used this story to galvanize his team to an underdog victory over the undefeated West Point team at Yankee Stadium.

The story of the Gipper has resonated through the decades. So has the story of Terry Fox – a story which epitomizes important features of the influence of the dead on the living.

Thirty years ago, the handsome young man with the prosthetic leg ceremonially dipped his foot into the Atlantic Ocean before beginning a run across Canada to raise money for cancer. Running the marathon distance every day, he slowly captured the hearts of Canadians from coast to coast to coast. When he had to quit his race because the cancer had spread to his lungs, there was an immediate outpouring of grief, sorrow and donations to his cause around the world. Another legacy was the Terry Fox Run, which has helped the Terry Fox Foundation raise half a billion dollars for cancer research since Terry died on June 28th, 1981, age 22.

Why did the Terry Fox story have such a vast and global impact? Certainly the efforts of his family to keep his memory alive have been an important factor. But the core of the story is that a personable young man captured our hearts as he pursued an astonishing goal – to run across Canada at the rate of one marathon a day with the aid of an artificial limb – and was defeated by the most dreaded disease of our time: lung cancer. Who could resist giving money to such a memory, in the hope of eventually vanquishing the disease that brought down our youthful hero?

We run for remembrance to honour heroes like Terry Fox when it turns out they were battling impossible odds. Compare the Terry Fox story with that of Canadian paraplegic athlete Rick Hansen, who in 1985 set out on a 40,000-kilometre, 26-month circumnavigation of the world by wheelchair. With single-minded determination and great personal charm, he ultimately raised $26 million for spinal cord research. However, he successfully finished his mission. There are no memorial events to celebrate his extraordinary achievement.

The Fallen
Sometimes we run for remembrance to protest an outrage. Consider the appalling events of March 3, 2005. On that day four Mounties were hunted and killed by a deranged man with a long criminal record and an obsessive hatred of police. Unprecedented in Canadian history, his horrific act took place near Mayerthorpe, Alberta. Shockwaves and outrage circled the globe. The slaying of four constables – Anthony Gordon, Leo Johnston, Brock Myrol and Peter Schiemann – led to the creation of a local park dedicated to their memory and to an annual fund-raising marathon. In this way their families, friends and colleagues were able to honour those in protective roles killed in the line of duty.

On a much larger scale is Belgium’s In Flanders Fields Marathon. The race starts on the Flemish coast and finishes at the historic city of Ypres. Along the flat roads are the fields where many of the horrors of the First World War took place. According to race director André Mingneau, running this course “may help to keep people’s mind open against useless violence and terror. That’s why our English, American and Canadian friends talk about (this race) as a ‘peace marathon’ or ‘a marathon for peace’.”

This idea is not difficult to understand. Imagine yourself in a marathon head-space running through the land where the Battle of Passchendaele and other terrible struggles of that war took place. You can’t help contemplating the mud, death, futility and the wretched conditions of trench warfare. Yes, as you finish that race you value peace even though you may never have had direct experience of war.

Wasted Lives
In 1996, three gay triathletes founded the Pride and Remembrance Run, which became an annual 5k fundraising run and walk coinciding with Toronto’s Pride Week. The event is dedicated to gay pride and remembrance – especially remembrance of people in that community who had died of AIDS. More than other memorial events, the race combines no-holds-barred celebration by the gay community with personal achievement. In keeping with Toronto’s world-famous Pride celebrations, odd costumes are everywhere. One moment you may see a bevy of men running in bridal dresses. The next you may see the Queen of England parading down the street. Ahead of the pack are hard-core runners in standard running gear.

The event is a fund-raiser for gay and lesbian charities. Top fund-raising honours – more than $60,000 – go to a team formed by two-time Olympic silver medalist Brian Orser and named in memory of champion ice dancer Robert McCall. McCall died of AIDS nearly 20 years ago.

The Pride and Remembrance Run is “a really remarkable expression of community spirit and dynamism and engagement” said race director Alan Belaiche. “The number of organizations that have gained not only financial resources but also profile in the community has been of inestimable value to people and to our community.... The feeling that comes from raising so much money for beneficiaries, it’s just unmatched for me.” The event is quirky and fun, yet it originated as a testament to those who had wasted into death from AIDS-related causes.

Quiet Losses
In the summer of 2009 a remarkable young woman named Janice Plewes – the mother of three young children and an extraordinary athlete – died in Penticton while she was on her bike doing a training ride to prepare for her fourth Ironman. The young driver behind the wheel of a car had failed to yield the right of way at a difficult intersection.

Janice’s tragic death touched hundreds in Calgary, where she grew up and lived with her family. To commemorate her life, the following year her family and friends gathered with their bicycles at the Highwood Pass on the eastern slope of the Rockies near Calgary. Highwood is the highest paved pass in Canada. Because of snow and other high-altitude weather conditions, it’s only open to automobile traffic during the summer months.

The date for the Janice Plewes memorial event was June 12th, on the last weekend of traffic-free riding. The message from her family said, “Please invite anyone you think would enjoy a day of cycling in the mountains in memory of a good friend.” The organizers described the occasion as the “first annual,” and the road was bright with bicycles and colourful riding gear when the day arrived.

And so it is that the quiet loss of loved ones inspires memorial events. In this case the participants commemorated the loss of a friend after the period of mourning had mostly passed. Sometimes, however, death can inspire athletic excellence before mourning even begins.

An extraordinary example of such inspiration occurred during the recent Winter Olympics, when figure skater Joannie Rochette’s mother died of a massive coronary just as she arrived in Vancouver to see her daughter compete in the women’s singles competition. Joannie chose to continue competing in her mother’s honour.

Hearts around the world swelled with compassion. Typical of the endless online and blogosphere tributes was this: “She is the true definition of the Olympic spirit. With grief in her heart she skated with bravery, star quality and with confidence in her ability... No matter what happens tomorrow night, Joannie is a star in her own right. Skate from the heart, Joannie. I am blessed to have watched you skate and will forever remember your courage. Best of luck tomorrow, stay strong and know that you are truly loved by so many Canadians!”

The world then watched in awe as she somehow transmuted her loss and her sorrow into bronze. In the Olympic short program, she recorded a new personal best of 71.36 – the third-highest score of the night. Two days later, she held on to her third place position after the long program and won the bronze medal. Because of her determination in the face of personal tragedy, she received the first Terry Fox Award for the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Several months later, she became the honourary spokeswoman for a fund-raising campaign to support awareness about heart disease in women.

The Big One
No organization has more effectively used fitness events as fund-raisers than the ones fighting cancer. The Terry Fox Run was the first mega-run to raise money for cancer. Its amazing half-billion dollar fund-raising achievement took place without organizers asking for a minimum donation from participants. Give what you can, in remembrance of Terry.

Thirty years later, cancer is still the biggest motivator for fund-raising events, but the fund-raising system has dramatically changed. For example, the two-day Ride to Conquer Cancer was a wild success when it debuted in BC and Alberta last year. The cost of participation is to raise at least $2,500 for the cause, although some overachievers raised as much as $50,000.

On the coast, 1,700 participants took part in what the event’s website describes as “an epic cycling journey from Vancouver to Seattle” – a two-day, 282km effort. In Alberta, a similar number of participants rode a beautiful 180km course along the eastern slopes of the Rockies. In each province, the event raised approximately $6.9 million, with net proceeds going respectively to the BC Cancer Foundation and the Alberta Cancer Board. These superbly conceived and promoted events are managed by an American fund-raising firm named CauseForce.

A related CauseForce event is the Weekend to End Women’s Cancers – a two-day, 60km fund-raising walk, with events in Calgary, Edmonton and Vancouver and elsewhere in Canada. To participate, you need to raise a minimum of $2,000. Over the last five years these events enabled the Alberta Cancer Board to invest $21 million in cancer research, and the BC Cancer Foundation to invest $15 million.

A veteran of five of these walks is Rejeanne Taylor, a Calgary-based breast cancer survivor. The first four years she participated to celebrate the fact that she personally had dodged a bullet. This year, however, is different. “I will be remembering a good friend – Monika Brunk of Hamburg – who recently died,” she said. “I’ve had other friends who died of cancer, but she is the first to die of breast cancer. I will be walking for her.”

“During (Monika’s) last week and afterwards her husband Hans almost pleaded with me,” she recalls. “He said ‘Please, please don’t forget Monika’ in three separate emails. There is something about remembrance for those left behind that says ‘She’s real and she continues in some way’. By celebrating people even when they are gone, you somehow validate their existence.”

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The Story of the Marathon

This article appears in the March 2010 issue of Impact magazine; image from here.

This year marks the 2,500th anniversary of the Battle of Marathon, where the legend inspiring today's long-distance endeavour was born.

The marathon is “the acme of athletic heroism,” according to Britain’s Roger Bannister, who first broke the four-minute mile and won Vancouver’s “Miracle Mile” in 1954. The miracle was that two competitors – Bannister and Australia’s John Landy – cracked four minutes in the same race.

By Peter McKenzie-Brown
Experienced marathoners know about the sometime heroism of endurance running. Most do not know, however, that the race which captured the imagination of the world a century ago has been fundamentally shaped by the heroism of four fine athletes: the legendary Pheidippedes, Greek idol Spyridon Louis, Italian champion Dorando Pietri and American iconoclast Bobbi Gibb.

In October the Athens Marathon will celebrate the 2500th anniversary of Pheidippides’ fabled run to Athens as a messenger from the Battle of Marathon. That battle was a turning point in a long series of wars between Greeks and the Persian Empire. The hero of our story is said to have run the marathon distance from the battlefield to Athens non-stop (and without aid stations) and burst into the Assembly crying “We have won!” He then collapsed and died.

Pheidippides’ demise doesn’t make sense until you put his story in context. He was by reputation the fastest runner in the Athenian army. When the generals realized the Persian forces were arriving, they dispatched him to Sparta to ask for immediate assistance against the invaders.

The Spartans were sympathetic, but couldn’t participate right away because of a religious festival, so Pheidippides ran back to rejoin his army – completing a 240-kilometre run in just two days. After a few days’ rest he fought in that decisive battle. Then he ran to Athens to proclaim victory. The running part of this extraordinary sequence totalled nearly 300 kilometres, and then there was the fighting.

Spyridon Louis
During the first modern Olympics in 1896, 17 runners (13 Greeks and four from other countries) ran the first competitive marathon along a course paralleling the one Pheidippides used. Twenty-five runners actually went to the start, but eight dropped out before the pistol fired. Only nine finished the 40-kilometre race, which Spyridon Louis won.

As Louis stopped at an inn toward the end of his run to drink a glass of wine, he could barely have imagined what was in store when he finished. He arrived in a stadium erupting with joy. Two Greek princes accompanied him on his final lap for a finishing time of 2:58:50.

His victory set off wild celebrations. According to the official report of the Games, “Here the Olympic Victor was received with full honour; the King rose from his seat and congratulated him most warmly on his success. Some of the King’s aides-de-camp and several members of the Committee went so far as to kiss and embrace the victor, who finally was carried in triumph to the retiring room under the vaulted entrance. The scene witnessed then inside the Stadium cannot be easily described, and even foreigners were carried away by the general enthusiasm.” When the King asked Louis to name his reward, the Olympic champion requested a donkey-drawn cart for his water-carrying business.

Given the Greek origins of the race, for many this year’s running of the Athens Classic Marathon will be the run of a lifetime. They will be celebrating Pheidippides’ legendary run on essentially the same course on which Spyridon Louis achieved Olympic glory 114 years ago.

First run as a regular marathon in 1972, the Athens Classic is a difficult race, with long uphill stretches for the first 30k. It begins in the town of Marathon, passing a tomb to the Athenian soldiers who died at the Battle of Marathon. From there it traces a path along the coast of the Aegean Sea, then into Athens. It finishes at Panathinaiko Stadium – a site for athletic competitions in ancient times and the place where Louis celebrated his tumultuous victory.

Dorando Pietri
Since those pioneering days, the marathon has become an established global phenomenon. Typically, about 5,000 marathoners compete in the Athens Classic, and it is just one of more than 800 marathons organized annually around the world. How did this occur?

Distance events began gaining popularity before the seminal 1896 Olympics. For example, Hamilton Ontario’s 30k Around the Bay Road Race is the oldest long-distance race in North America. It was first run in 1894 – two years before the first Olympics and three years before Boston, which is the longest continuing marathon. But the road race with the magic allure is the marathon, which is defined by its peculiar length.

During the first 15 years of the modern marathon, the event was run at seven different distances, ranging from the original 40k to a 42.75k race in 1920. The seemingly arbitrary official distance now honoured around the world – 42.195k – commemorates another heroic finish.

This distance was first run during the 1908 Olympics in London. A 25-mile marathon had been planned, but King Edward VII asked to have the race begin near Queen Victoria’s statue at Windsor Castle. In addition, complaints about tram-lines and cobblestones in the final few miles of the course led to a revised distance of 26 miles to the stadium, plus a 385-yard lap of the track. This is the distance each race honours today.

That distance might have been nothing but an eccentric footnote in marathon history if not for the dramatic finish of that fabulous event. The crowd of 7,500 in the stadium, which included Queen Alexandra, watched as Italian champion Dorando Pietri began his final lap going the wrong way around the track. Officials turned him around, and he staggered to the finish line, falling to the ground several times. Of his total time on the course (2:58:46), he spent ten minutes running the short lap in the stadium. Irish-American Johnny Hayes was getting ever closer, and well-intentioned officials helped Pietri up each time he fell. In the end, Pietri was disqualified for accepting assistance, and Hayes was awarded the gold.

This high-drama finish led to marathon fever in much of the world. There were several re-matches between Pietri and Hayes – all of them over the eccentric London distance. Marathons continued to be run at varying distances, however, until 1921. That’s when, in honour of a marathon still considered the “race of the century,” the International Association of Athletic Federations established the official distance at 26 miles 385 yards (42.195k).

Bobbi Gibb
The last formative event in marathon history came in 1966 with Bobbi Gibb’s historic run at Boston. Gibb was not the first woman to run the marathon distance – for example, in Britain Violet Piercy set the first woman’s record with an official time of 3:40:22 on October 3, 1926.

But as the sport developed, marathon’s governing bodies increasingly refused to sanction female competitors. Gibb had tried to register for Boston but “received a curt reply that women were not physiologically able to run such distances and furthermore were not allowed to do so,” she later recalled. “My outrage turned to humor as I thought how many preconceived prejudices would crumble when I trotted right along for twenty-six miles.”

Initially disguised as a man, Gibb ran as a bandit – an unregistered participant. Wearing her brother’s Bermuda shorts and a blue-hooded sweatshirt over a black swim suit, she hid in the crowds near the starting pen. She waited until half the pack had begun and then ran into the fray.

When other runners and spectators realized a woman was in the race, they greeted her with cheers and good humour. As the day heated up and her confidence grew, Gibb discarded her sweatshirt. She maintained a steady pace until the last few miles, when Heartbreak Hill, dehydration, fatigue and blisters took their toll on the uncoached runner. Since running shoes for women were not available, she wore an ill-fitting new pair of boys’ size six running shoes. As the miles wore on, she blistered badly. “Each step sent a searing jolt of pain to my brain….,” she recalled. “My pace dropped off. I set each foot down as if on tacks.”

Gibb ran through extreme pain for the last few miles, finishing the race in 3:21:40 – 126th out of some 450 runners. Although she was greeted by cheering crowds, a burst of media attention, and a congratulatory handshake from the Governor of Massachusetts, she wasn’t invited to the post-race awards celebration. Her accomplishment made newspaper headlines around the world, but the race director denied that she had participated in the Boston Marathon. She had merely “run the same route.”

Gibb unofficially ran Boston in each of the following two years, and she was joined by other women – notably Kathrine Switzer, who in 1967 registered as “K.V. Switzer” and was the first woman to run with a race number. The race director famously tried to rip the number off her, and was flattened by Switzer’s boyfriend.

The fight for gender equality was unstoppable. Women were officially permitted to compete at Boston in 1972, and the women’s marathon became an Olympic event in 1984. On the 30th anniversary of Gibbs’ historic run, the Boston Athletics Association retroactively recognized as champions the unofficial women’s leaders of 1966 through 1971.

Today’s marathon records are the astonishing 2:03:59 of Ethiopia’s Haile Gebrselassie, and 2:15:25 for Britain’s Paula Radcliffe. Those spectacular performances and the hundreds of thousands of others clocked each year owe much to the pioneers of this mass-participation sport – men and women like Bobbi Gibb, Dorando Pietri, Spyridon Louis and, first and foremost, Pheidippides.

The world has changed immeasurably in the last two and a half millennia. Heroism hasn’t.