Father of the Century

photo taken from - http://www.teamhoyt.com/photos/index.shtml

I've been watching YouTube alot these days, well I believe in a few years time, written blog is dead. it will all be video blogging. Amidst all the junks on YouTube, there are some good stuff there as well. Yea sure many people get famous overnight but there are good videos of people doing whatever they can in life to succeed. Team Hoyt is one of them. I got this story forward to me, I din bump into this video. but i'll post the video at the end of this entry.

The version here is quite complete, but if you want a full one go to http://www.teamhoyt.com

Team Hoyt
85 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 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!"

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 ."