Great Strides

Moving Forward, One Step at a Time

Sometimes the greatest stride is the first one, that first hesitant step forward, confronting fear and acknowledging the challenge.

When Kathy and Steve van Nostrand travelled from their home in Sydney, N.S., for the 2013 Toronto Marathon, they seemed as though they were at the peak of their running careers. The couple had a combined 11 Boston Marathon finishes in the previous six years, running four of them side by side, with identical finishing times.

With a winter’s worth of training in their legs, they made their way to Toronto for the marathon on a sunny Sunday in May with their 18-year-old daughter Emma, ready to run her first marathon.

However, tragedy struck during the race. Emma collapsed just three kilometres from the finish, stricken by an undiagnosed heart ailment, and died.

By the time Kathy finished the marathon that day, paramedics had taken Emma away before she knew what had happened. Emma’s death changed everything for Kathy and Steve. They stopped running marathons, and the pain of going home to Sydney without Emma had a deep, long-lasting effect. “I never wanted to come back to Toronto,” Kathy says.

Instead, she and Steve put their efforts into honouring Emma’s memory. Almost as soon as they got back to Sydney, they launched the Emma van Nostrand Memorial Run. Held yearly on the same weekend as the Toronto Marathon, the event saw hundreds of participants run from the van Nostrands’ house to Riverview Rural High School and back, raising money for scholarships for students at Emma’s alma mater. They also signed up to support the United Way of Cape Breton as campaign co-chairs, launching an annual fundraising gala.

Eventually, the United Way gala took on a life of its own, and a one-year commitment turned into five for Steve and Kathy. Since then, the gala has raised over $1,180,000 over four years to reduce child poverty.

“It’s a big problem in Nova Scotia,” Kathy says. “In Toronto, it’s easy to see – the kids are out on the streets. In Nova Scotia, they’re hidden.” A funny thing happened because of the United Way obligation, though. The huge time commitment left little time to organize Emma’s run each year, so they put it on hold. Last winter, Kathy joined a challenge to run the first 100 days of the year in Emma’s memory. With that first weekend in May once again free, some of the challenge participants invited Kathy to join them in running the 2019 Toronto Marathon. She said yes.

“It’s not closure, it’s moving forward,” Kathy says of her return to Toronto last May, exactly six years to the day since Emma’s passing.

In all, 38 people joined the Toronto excursion, including the whole van Nostrand family. Steve, along with Emma’s siblings Daniel, Alyssa and Katy, all ran the 10k. Kathy finished the marathon, pausing to ref lect on that fateful day in 2013, while still moving forward, one stride at a time.

When their turn in the United Way co-chair seats ends, Kathy and Steve plan to revive Emma’s memorial run, with a fitting goal – to raise enough money to help build a gym at the Cape Breton Regional Hospital, one of Emma’s pet projects.

After a knee procedure last year, Steve is training for a marathon again. They’d both like to go back to Boston one day. In October, they were back in Toronto for the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon. Kathy ran the full marathon again, and Steve ran the half. Talking about life, training and Boston qualifiers before the race expo, they sounded like any other runner.

It’s part of an approach to life that Kathy believes is essential in dealing with grief and tragedy.

“It ’s not what happens to you,” she says. “It ’s what you make of it.”