I
try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans.
Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take
them to swimsuit shoots.
But compared with Dick Hoyt, I suck.
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.
Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken
him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled
him across the U.S. On a bike. Makes taking your son
bowling look a little lame, right?
And what has Rick done for his father? Not
much--except save his life.
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 boy
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 . It must be a
buzzkill to be a 25-year-old stud getting passed by
an old guy towing a grown man in a dinghy, don't you
think?
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 sit in the chair and I push him once."
For you to be so affected by this story and
accompanying videos that you will become and stay
determined to live every single day of the rest of
your life on purpose, achieve everything you want
to do, enjoy your life as much as humanly possible
and for the world to be a better place for you
having lived in it.
I
try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans.
Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take
them to swimsuit shoots. 
