Taking Back My Life One Step At a Time

He ran 3,339 miles on one leg, completing a marathon every day for 143 days. Cancer stopped him, but his dream kept going.

On April 12, 1980, in St. John’s, Newfoundland, a 21-year-old man with curly hair and an artificial leg stood at the edge of the Atlantic Ocean. He dipped his prosthetic into the cold water, turned west, and started running.

His name was Terry Fox. He planned to run across Canada, covering more than 5,000 miles on one leg. Many people thought he was crazy, but he would prove them wrong in a heartbreaking way.

Three years earlier, Terry was a typical 18-year-old athlete. Then he felt pain in his right knee. The diagnosis hit hard: osteogenic sarcoma, a rare bone cancer. The only treatment was amputation.

The night before his surgery, Terry’s coach gave him an article about the first amputee to run a marathon. While lying in his hospital bed, Terry made a life-changing decision. He told his family, “I’m going to do something about this. I’m going to run for the others.”

He went through months of tough chemotherapy. He saw children around him suffer and die in the hospital ward. As he recovered, he started training. Learning to run on a heavy, basic prosthetic was extremely painful.

Every step sent sharp pain through his stump. He trained in secret for 18 months, developing a unique, lurching hop-step that would soon become famous.

He called his mission the Marathon of Hope. His goal was to raise money for cancer research, not for himself, but for those still fighting the disease.

The first weeks were tough. He faced cold rain, strong winds, and busy highways. Some days, he raised no money at all. His stump chafed until it bled, but every morning, he put on his prosthetic and ran 42 kilometers.

As he crossed into Ontario, something shifted. The “crazy kid” became a national icon. Towns shut down to cheer him on. People lined the streets, inspired by his raw determination. The “clank-step, clank-step” of his artificial leg became the heartbeat of a nation.

On September 1, 1980, near Thunder Bay, Ontario, Terry woke up struggling to breathe. The cancer had returned—this time in his lungs. He managed only one mile before he had to stop.

At a final press conference, tears streaming down his face, he said,

“I just wish people would realize that anything’s possible if you try. Dreams are made if people try.”

Terry passed away on June 28, 1981, just a month shy of his 23rd birthday. But his journey didn’t end there. The annual Terry Fox Run was born, spreading to over 60 countries. To date, over $850 million has been raised for cancer research in his name.

Terry didn’t see himself as a hero. He was just a kid who saw suffering and decided he wouldn’t look away. He proved that even when life forces you to stop, your impact can keep running forever.

His greatness was not about finishing the race; it was about having the courage to start and the heart to never give up on the purpose behind it.

He didn't just run across a country; he ran into the collective soul of humanity.

>We Are Human Angels<
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Awakening the Human Spirit
We are the authors of 'We Are Human Angels,' the book that has spread a new vision of the human experience and has been spontaneously translated into 14 languages by readers.

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His mother wouldn't hold him. His classmates wouldn't accept him. The world said he had no future. He proved every single one of them wrong.
On December 4, 1982, in a hospital in Melbourne, Australia, a baby boy was born and the delivery room went quiet. No one had expected this. Three ultrasounds during the pregnancy had shown nothing unusual. But when Nicholas James Vujicic arrived, he had no arms and no legs.
The condition is called tetra-amelia syndrome. It is extraordinarily rare. There was no medical explanation. There was no warning. And there was nothing anyone could do.
His mother, a nurse, was so overwhelmed that she refused to see him or hold him. According to Nick's own account, she and his father left the hospital. His father was so shaken he became physically ill. For months, his parents struggled to accept what had happened to their firstborn child.
Eventually, they did. They chose to raise him not as a child with a disability, but as a child with a future. They fought to enroll him in mainstream school when the law in their state initially barred children with physical disabilities from attending. Nick became one of the first students with his condition to be integrated into a regular classroom.
But school was brutal.
Other children bullied him relentlessly. They stared. They mocked. They excluded him. By the time he was eight years old, Nick had begun to wonder whether his life had any purpose at all. By age ten, he tried to end it — attempting to drown himself in the bathtub in his family's home.
He stopped when he thought of his parents. He realized that his death would cause them more pain than his life ever had. Something in that moment shifted. Instead of giving up, he decided to keep going.
And then he started doing things no one believed were possible.
Nick was born with one partial foot — two fused toes on his left hip that doctors later separated in surgery. He calls it his "chicken drumstick." With that single foot, he taught himself to write, type forty-three words a minute on a computer, operate an electric wheelchair, comb his hair, brush his teeth, and answer the phone. He learned to swim. Then to surf. To skateboard. To play drums. To dive off a boat into the ocean. To skydive.
At seventeen, he stood up in front of his church group and spoke about his life. The room was stunned. He realized in that moment that his pain wasn't just his — it was a bridge to other people's pain. If he could look at an audience with no arms and no legs and say "I'm okay," people who had legs and arms and still felt broken might believe they could be okay too.
He never stopped speaking.
Nick graduated from Griffith University at twenty-one with a double major in accounting and financial planning. In 2005, he founded Life Without Limbs, an international nonprofit ministry. In 2007, he launched Attitude is Altitude, a secular motivational speaking company. He has addressed audiences in over sixty countries. He has met twenty-one heads of state. He has written multiple bestselling books, including Life Without Limits, which has been translated into more than thirty languages. He starred in a short film called The Butterfly Circus and won Best Actor at an independent film festival.
And then he found the thing he'd been most afraid he would never have.
In 2010, at a speaking event in Dallas, Nick locked eyes with a young nursing student named Kanae Miyahara. She was half Japanese, half Mexican, and she wasn't looking at what was missing. She was looking at what was there. They fell in love. He proposed in 2011 on a yacht, using his mouth to slide the ring onto her finger. They married on February 12, 2012.
Today, Nick and Kanae have four children — two sons, Kiyoshi and Dejan, and twin daughters, Ellie and Olivia. All four were born healthy.
The boy whose mother once couldn't hold him now holds his children every night.
Nick has spoken openly about the challenges of fatherhood without limbs — the frustration of hearing his baby cry and not being able to physically help. But he also speaks about what he can give them: presence, patience, faith, and an example of a life lived without excuses.
His mother, who once walked out of that delivery room, is now one of his biggest supporters. She has spoken publicly about her initial grief and her journey to understanding that her son was not a tragedy — he was a gift.
Nick Vujicic's life does not prove that everything happens for a reason. It proves something more important than that.
It proves that when you refuse to let the worst moment of your life become the last chapter of your story, what follows can be extraordinary.
No arms. No legs. No limits.

~Wonders ane Facts