It's not a task that many would undertake; running most of the way across the country for a pair of charities.

For Rick Fall, however, who is running from Victoria, B.C. to his home Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, both running and charity have always been a part of his life.

The journey across the prairies and into Ontario seemed like a natural progression after being involved with their local Terry Fox run for more than a decade.

Fall and his wife stopped in Swift Current on Friday and Saturday to take a rest day, and the runner sat down with Swift Current Online to talk about the two challenges of running across the country during a pandemic, and why he felt that the time was right to make the trek on behalf of Make-a-Wish and Childhood Cancer Canada.

"With the Terry Fox run, he was with cancer research. And I wanted to stick with the cancer theme and I thought, well, why not just go with kid's cancer because kids are our future."

Having a niece who had been granted a Make-a-Wish through the Children's Wish Foundation also made that charity a natural choice, and he was able to arrange to run on behalf of both.

Fall expects that they should make it home by the latter half of summer, and after that he would like to complete two more world marathons in Tokyo and London, followed by a bit of a slow down to recuperate.

"I'm going to try to concentrate on getting into those two marathons, and then if I'm able to do those, just slow it down with the running; do halves and 10K runs, but keep running because they say once you stop, you drop. So keep going."

Fall added that COVID placed a number of changes on marathons in 2020, including delaying his own cross-country trek, adding that he's unsure about Tokyo or London due to the number of participants that are now back-logged.

To learn more about Rick and his journey, watch the full interview below. And to follow Rick's progress, look to fallorick.com and follow the links to his Facebook pages.