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 wheelc hair 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 too k 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 d ad 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 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 .”