Heck, I noticed the scale even just driving there, I skirted the course and endured a parade of irate drivers who didn’t realize that the road closure they were tolerating was part of an effort to raise a boat load of money for breast cancer research. All they likely saw was a bunch of orange traffic cones and an extra five minutes bolted onto their Sunday travels as a whole corner of the city was constricted by a fun run course.

I continue to be simultaneously amazed (and a little amused) that these big participatory running events have become one of the flagship fundraising efforts for a long list of organizations.

What is it, after all, about lacing up and jaunting around as a community, as a vast hoard of be-sloganed t-shirt wearing part-time athletes that makes them work? Not only do we all pay to participate, we donate extra and then beg friends and family members for even more money with the promise that (a) it’s for a good cause but also (b) I’m going to go sweat it out for thirty minutes, too.

Is it about community? Is it about public commitment? Is it because a race has a clear finish line and this damn disease we’re collectively fighting seems like a race that never ends?

Maybe a bit of each. Or maybe it’s just a reason to find some solidarity in an unfair universe. Either way, if you had a long commute to church or brunch or grandma’s house on Sunday because of a race closure, you can feel good too that a lot of sweaty people were delaying you for a good cause.

This morning I signed up for another charity run in October… also, to raise money for cancer research.

It’s a weird concept, the charity race, if you think about it too much.

We don’t just say “hey, this cancer thing is a sonofabitch so let’s give some money to try to fix it” but rather we decide to put on a logo’d t-shirt proclaiming how much we despise the disease and then go run five klicks in some kind of solidarity while giving about the same amount of money as we would have anyways.

The Kid was trying to wrap her mind around how donating money “to cancer” helped cure cancer… as if we just needed more money for medicine or something.

It’s about research, isn’t it? I explained. Labs, equipment, people with years of expertise—and I’m sure a long list of other more specific things—aren’t free. Most researchers, people with PhDs and their grad students, spend the bulk of their time writing extended applications with novella-sized explanations to try and extract a tiny bit of that money for their work. They get it and it gets spent on all the costs of doing complex science and hopefully nudging our knowledge of new treatments and better therapies and more promising outcomes a few baby steps forward.

And so maybe that’s why we run: because research is slow, and incremental and (to a lot of people embedded in the work) probably feels like wading through an endless field of deep, sticky mud. We all lace up and go as fast as we can to pay for it all.

Near the top of that second list is the late, great Terry Fox.

As I write and post this (in late September) we are about to commemorate this national treasure with the annual Terry Fox Run, a community fun run and fundraiser continuing the legacy of a young man who when faced with the diagnosis of cancer just started running.

The story of Terry Fox is about as well known to the average Canadian as any modern folk tale. A young man is diagnosed with a disease that, at the time, was almost certainly fatal. Despite losing a leg and being left to get around on a 1980s prosthetic limb, he set out to run across Canada, a planned distance of over eight thousand kilometres with a goal of raising a million bucks for research.

He made it 5,373 kilometres (or 3,339 miles) before complications sidelined him. And he was unable to continue or finish before he passed from the disease.

Now, decades later, each September hoards of Canadians converge on local events to log their own mileage and raise a bit more cash to contribute to what is now an astronomical total of over a billion dollars raised to fight cancer.

This weekend I’ll be logging my own ten klicks for Terry. I’m not canvasing for collections, but you can certainly donate to the cause at terryfox.org