Tuesday, January 16, 2007
-World's Strongest Dad-
Strongest Dad in the World
[From Sports Illustrated, By Rick Reilly]
I try to be a good father. Work nights to pay for their text messaging.
Take them to swimsuit shoots. But compared with Dick Hoyt, I stink.
Eighty-five times he's pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in
marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair
but also towed him 2.4 miles in a dinghy while swimming and pedaled him
112 miles in a seat on the handlebars--all in the same day.
This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was
strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged
and unable to control his limbs.
``He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life;'' Dick says doctors told
him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. ``Put him in an
institution.''But the Hoyts weren't buying it. They noticed the way Rick's
eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the
engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything
to help the by communicate. ``No way,'' Dick says he was told.``There's
nothing going on in his brain.''"Tell him a joke,'' Dick countered. They
did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain. Rigged up
with a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a
switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate.
First words? ``Go Bruins!'' And after a high school classmate was
paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him,
Rick pecked out, ``Dad, I want to do that.''
Yeah, right. How was Dick, a self-described ``porker'' who never ran more
than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles? Still, he tried.
``Then it was me who was handicapped,'' Dick says. ``I was sore for two
weeks.'' That day changed Rick's life. ``Dad,'' he typed, ``when we were
running,it felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!'' And that sentence
changed Dick's life. He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as
often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were
ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon. ``No way,'' Dick was told by a race
official. The Hoyts weren't quite a single runner, and they weren't quite
a wheelchair competitor. For a few years Dick and Rick just joined the
massive field and ran anyway, then they found a way to get into the race
officially: In 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the
qualifying time for Boston the following year.
Then somebody said, ``Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?'' How's a guy who
never learned to swim and hadn't ridden a bike since he
was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick
tried. Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour
Ironmans in Hawaii. Hey, Dick, why not see how you'd do on your own? ``No
way,'' he says.Dick does it purely for ``the awesome feeling'' he gets
seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together.
This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston
Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best
time'? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992--only 35 minutes off the world
record, which, in case you don't keep track of these things, happens to be
held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time.
`No question about it,'' Rick types. ``My dad is the Father of the
Century.'' And Dick got something else out of all this too. Two years ago
he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his
arteries was 95% clogged. ``If you hadn't been in such great shape,'' one
doctor told him, ``you probably would've died 15 years ago.'' So, in a
way, Dick and Rick saved each other's life.
Rick, who has his own apartment (he gets home care)and works in Boston,and
Dick, retired from the military and living in Holland, Mass., always find
ways to be together. They give speeches around the country and compete in
some backbreaking race every weekend, including this Father's Day. That
night, Rick will buy his dad dinner, but the thing he really wants to give
him is a gift he can never buy.
``The thing I'd most like,'' Rick types, ``is that my dad sits in the
chair and I push him once.''
| [T.C] fought for sanity @ 8:04 AM|
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Wednesday, January 10, 2007
--
once a tc, always a tc.im sure everyone agrees with me
everyone have fun with As (cept qk of cos)
[T.C]abdiel.
| [T.C] fought for sanity @ 6:50 PM|
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