Survival Saturday: You Don’t Have To Reach The Finish Line

I’ve been thinking about unfinished things lately. The plans we make that don’t happen, the careers we leave, the relationships that end, the dreams that quietly change somewhere along the way. We don’t usually tell those stories when we talk about success. We like stories with clean endings. Someone decides to do something incredibly difficult, struggles for a while, refuses to give up, and eventually crosses the finish line while everyone cheers. Those are good stories. I love those stories. But they aren’t how life always works. Sometimes you can do everything right, give everything you have, refuse to quit, and still not get the ending you were working toward. I think that’s one of the reasons Terry Fox’s story has been sitting with me, because when you really look at it, this isn’t actually a story about someone who reached his goal. Terry Fox never made it to his finish line.

Terry was eighteen years old when he was diagnosed with osteogenic sarcoma, a form of bone cancer, in his right leg. Three days later, his leg was amputated above the knee. I keep thinking about how young eighteen really is. At eighteen, most of us were just beginning to figure out who we were. We were making plans based on the assumption that there would be plenty of time to change them later. Terry was learning how to live without part of his leg and spending time around other cancer patients, including children who were younger than he was. That experience changed something in him. He became convinced that more money needed to go toward cancer research, and eventually he came up with an idea that, even now, sounds a little crazy: he was going to run across Canada on an artificial leg and raise money along the way.

He spent eighteen months training for what he called the Marathon of Hope. On April 12, 1980, he stood at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean in St. John’s, Newfoundland, dipped his artificial leg into the water, and started running west. His plan was to cross the country and eventually reach the Pacific. In the beginning, there wasn’t some huge crowd following him or television cameras waiting everywhere he went. Some days people barely noticed him. But he kept running. He ran through bad weather, exhaustion, pain, and long stretches of road where there wasn’t much evidence that this enormous thing he had decided to do was going to become enormous at all. Then people started paying attention. Towns began waiting for him. Donations increased. More people heard about the young man running across Canada on an artificial leg to raise money for cancer research, and slowly his run became something much bigger than Terry.

For 143 days, he averaged roughly a marathon a day. Just sit with that for a second because I think numbers like that can become meaningless when we read them too quickly. He wasn’t running a marathon and then spending the next few weeks recovering. He was getting up the next morning and doing it again. And then again. And then again. He covered 5,373 kilometers—3,339 miles. I don’t think I can fully understand what that demanded from his body, especially with the prosthetic technology available in 1980. But I also don’t think the mileage is the most important part of this story. The part I keep coming back to is what happened next.

On September 1, Terry was running outside Thunder Bay, Ontario, when he could no longer continue. He had been having chest pain and difficulty breathing. He went to the hospital and learned that the cancer had returned and spread to his lungs. That was it. After eighteen months of training and 143 days of running, his Marathon of Hope stopped on the side of the road. The Pacific Ocean was still thousands of miles away.

I wonder what that felt like.

Not the public version of it. Not the newspaper story or the brave words said in front of cameras. I wonder what it felt like when Terry was alone with the realization that he wasn’t going to finish. He had done everything people tell us we’re supposed to do when we want something badly enough. He worked. He sacrificed. He kept going when it hurt. He got up the next morning and tried again. He didn’t stop because he lost interest or decided it was too difficult. Cancer came back. His body couldn’t keep going, and there was nothing determination could do about that.

I think that’s the part of his story that feels so human to me, because most of us eventually run into something determination can’t fix.

Maybe it isn’t cancer and maybe you aren’t trying to cross Canada, but you probably know what it feels like to have a picture in your head of how something is supposed to turn out and then watch life take it somewhere else. You thought you would stay married. You thought that job was going to be the one you retired from. You thought your family would look a certain way. You thought someone would still be here. You thought your body would keep doing what it had always done. You thought you’d have more time. You thought the thing you spent years building was going somewhere, and then one day you looked around and realized you weren’t going to reach the destination you had been working toward.

I’ve had some of those roads myself. There are things in my life that I was absolutely convinced were going somewhere different than where they ended up. There are things I worked incredibly hard for and eventually walked away from, seasons I thought would last much longer than they did, and plans that made complete sense until suddenly they didn’t. I’ve wondered whether some of that time was wasted. I think most of us do that when something ends. We look backward and start doing the math. I gave this many years to that. I sacrificed this much for it. I worked this hard. I believed in it this much. And if I didn’t get where I thought I was going, then what was all of that for?

Maybe that’s the wrong question.

Terry Fox didn’t make it across Canada. That’s simply true. He never reached the Pacific and never completed the run he set out to complete. He died on June 28, 1981, at twenty-two years old. If we measured his story only by the goal he wrote down at the beginning, we would have to call it unfinished. But before Terry died, his goal of raising one dollar for every Canadian had been reached. The annual Terry Fox Run continued without him, just as he knew it would. People kept running after Terry couldn’t, and in 2026 the Terry Fox Foundation announced that more than one billion dollars had been raised for cancer research in his name.

A billion dollars came from an unfinished run.

I don’t know why that hits me the way it does, but it does. Maybe because I think we are sometimes far too quick to decide that something failed simply because it didn’t become what we originally imagined. We judge the whole experience by the finish line. Did the marriage last? Did the business succeed? Did you get the degree? Did you stay in the career? Did the plan work? Did you become the person you thought you were going to become? We rarely stop and ask what happened during all those miles.

Maybe that’s worth asking.

What came from the miles?

Maybe the job you eventually left taught you something you use every day now. Maybe the relationship that didn’t last still changed you. Maybe the dream you didn’t accomplish led you toward one you couldn’t see yet. Maybe the years you think you wasted were years when you were learning boundaries, courage, compassion, patience, or exactly what you never wanted to do again. Maybe someone watched you survive something and learned that they could survive something too. Maybe you started something another person carried forward. Maybe the destination changed, but that doesn’t mean the journey disappeared.

I think there is a difference between trying to make suffering sound beautiful and recognizing that something can still come from it. I don’t want to pretend every painful thing happens for some neat reason that eventually makes us grateful it happened. There are things I would change if I could. There are losses I would undo. There are experiences I wouldn’t choose again just because I learned something from them. Meaning doesn’t require us to be grateful for what hurt us. Sometimes meaning is simply realizing that what happened next still belongs to us.

And maybe that is what I like most about Terry’s story. He couldn’t control whether the cancer came back. He couldn’t control how many miles his body would give him. He couldn’t guarantee that he would reach the Pacific Ocean. All he could do was start and then keep going for as long as he could. When he couldn’t go any farther, the miles he had already traveled didn’t disappear. Other people simply started running from where he stopped.

There is something I need to remember in that, and maybe you do too. We don’t always get to see where the things we begin eventually lead. We don’t always get the ending we pictured. Sometimes we change our minds. Sometimes circumstances change them for us. Sometimes life closes a door we were still trying desperately to hold open. None of that automatically means the time before it was wasted.

Terry Fox didn’t reach his finish line. More than forty years later, people are still moving because he started.

Maybe there is an unfinished thing in your life that deserves another look. Not because you need to reopen it or go back and finish it, but because maybe you’ve been telling yourself the wrong story about it. Maybe you’ve been calling something a failure when it was actually a few thousand miles of your life that helped bring you here. Maybe instead of asking why you didn’t make it all the way to the place you once imagined, you can turn around for a minute and look at the road behind you.

You might be surprised by how far you actually went.

Reflection

Question: What unfinished part of your life have you been judging only by the finish line you didn’t reach?

Practical takeaway: Pick one thing that didn’t turn out the way you planned and ask yourself a different question: What came from those miles? Don’t force a lesson or try to make the ending prettier than it was. Just look honestly at what you learned, what changed in you, what you carried forward, and where that road eventually led.

Maybe unfinished doesn’t mean unsuccessful.

Maybe it just means the story went somewhere you couldn’t see when you started.