Japan sent only two athletes to the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm, and one of them was marathon runner Shiso (often spelled Shizo) Kanakuri. The trip took ten days by train, and race day was brutally hot. Partway through the marathon he collapsed and was taken in by a local family, and rather than face officials and admit he had failed, he went home without telling anyone. In Sweden he was officially listed as missing for more than 50 years. In 1967, Swedish television tracked him down in Japan and asked whether he would like to finish his race. At 75 he went back to Stockholm and crossed the finish line with an official time of 54 years, 246 days, and change. “It was a long trip,” he said. “Along the way I got married, had six children and 10 grandchildren.”
In July 1948, during the Berlin Airlift, American pilot Gail Halvorsen met about 30 hungry kids at the barbed wire fence at Tempelhof airfield. All he had in his pocket were two sticks of gum, so he broke them in half and passed them through the fence. The kids who got gum tore up the wrappers and shared the strips so the others could at least smell them. Halvorsen was so moved that he promised to drop candy the next day and told them they’d know his plane because he would wiggle the wings. He started tying candy and gum to makeshift parachutes, and the idea grew into Operation Little Vittles. He lived to be 101, still known around the world as the Candy Bomber.
In March 1977, when Terry Fox was only 18, doctors amputated his right leg above the knee because of bone cancer. Within weeks he was walking on an artificial leg, and the night before his surgery a coach had brought him a story about an amputee who ran the New York Marathon. Terry decided to run across Canada to raise money for cancer research. He started at St. John’s, Newfoundland, on April 12, 1980, and ran an average of 42 kilometers a day, about a marathon every day. After 143 days and 5,373 kilometers, cancer had spread to his lungs, and he had to stop outside Thunder Bay, Ontario. He died in June 1981, a month before his 23rd birthday. The annual Terry Fox Run has since raised more than 800 million dollars.
Two weeks after an ALS diagnosis forced him out of baseball, Lou Gehrig stood at home plate in Yankee Stadium on July 4, 1939, in front of 61,808 fans. He had every reason to talk about his bad break, but instead he spent the speech thanking people: the fans, his teammates, his managers, the groundskeepers, his parents, his wife, and even his mother-in-law. “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth,” he said, closing with the words that he might have been given a bad break, but he had an awful lot to live for. Gehrig died less than two years later, at 37, but that day he showed the whole country that gratitude can stand up tall in the middle of a storm.
