E-mail of the Week

This is an excerpt from "Strongest Dad in the World," a Sports Illustrated piece by Rick Reilly:

Eighty-five times Dick Hoyt has 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....

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...

After a high school classmate was paralyzed in an accident and the school organized a charity run for him, Rick wanted to do that...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....in 1993, they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year.
Then somebody said, "Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon?"....

Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii....

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....

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.''