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[LCLiving]

OT- But well worth the time. Makes me realize how much more I could be doing.

Posted by: NovoMira
In reply to: None
Date:11/10/2006 1:38:13 AM
Post #of 16857

I've taken the following post from another board.....

There are sports stories and then there are real stories...
the video is incredible!

From Rick Reilly
Sports Illustrated

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 wheel chair 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 has 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 Dic k'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."
............................

Here's the video....if you don't watch it, you will miss
something very special...

(watch it alone, cause you're gonna well up!?*)