BY THE CANADIAN PRESS
WINNIPEG — A young aboriginal man from Winnipeg celebrated his triumphant return to his hometown on the weekend after running all the way from Mexico to raise money for cancer research.
Cole Choken, who began his 7,000-kilometre run on Jan. 1st in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, arrived in Winnipeg on Saturday.
The 25-year-old who once weighed 340 pounds, caught the fitness bug in 2006 and has since lost 110 pounds.
“It started with just running down the block,” Choken said in an interview Sunday.
“I was a really big guy.
“I asked my friends in high school, ‘Did you ever think I could do this?’ And they said, ’No, you were the guy who loved eating all the time.”’
When Choken was 20 he already weighed well over 300 pounds. His mother said she used to sleep in the living room to stop her son from ordering pizzas, but Choken had a cellphone and simply told the delivery drivers to come to his bedroom window.
Then he said he had a dream where he was laying on the side of the road and an old man told him to get up and run with him. Choken woke up, and even though it was 2 a.m., he stepped out the front door and tried to run to the end of the block.
He said he knew he needed to make a change.
“I’ve been to a lot of funerals of a lot of my uncles who’ve passed away from diabetes,” explained Choken.
He has completed several fundraising runs for diabetes research, including one from Calgary to Winnipeg in 2007.
His latest run, which raised about $9,000, took him from Mexico, up the U.S. east coast and then west across Canada.
Choken’s mother, Brenda Choken, accompanied him on the trip. At first she was driving the car that was hauling the camper that they slept in along the way. But she said it soon became too difficult to watch Cole run.
She said she got her daughter to drive, while she ran alongside her son.
“As a mother, when you see your own son suffering, it’s very hard to see him with all the pain,” she explained.
“So I started running along with him in New Jersey.”
When they got to Winnipeg, they were joined by well-wishers that included Choken’s cousin, actor Adam Beach.
Manitoba-born Beach starred in Clint Eastwood’s wartime epic Flags of Our Fathers, and appeared in Windtalkers with Nicolas Cage.
Choken also received congratulations from aboriginal leaders.
“Cole has demonstrated tremendous strength and his leadership will no doubt motivate many other youth and First Nation citizens to pursue healthy lifestyles and the need to raise further awareness of (cancer),” Shawn Atleo, national chief of the Assembly of First Nations, said Sunday in a news release.
Choken said it feels strange to be getting so much attention.
“It’s weird because some people ask for my autograph and I’m just a regular guy who works at Olive Garden,” he said.
Choken won’t be staying in Winnipeg long — he’s planning to start running again this week and hopes to make it to Calgary. He said he wants to finish there because it’s where the 2007 run started, which he considers his “first big run.”
Even then, he might just keep going.
“It’s getting colder too and I don’t have heat in my trailer,” he noted. “(But) if my mother was up for it, I’d keep going for sure.”