World’s Strongest Dad

April 6, 2007 by Adam
Filed under Whatever Else

I saw this a while ago on the TV, but came across it last night and it got my attention once again. THERE IS A GREAT VIDEO ABOUT THEM AT THE END

Father and Son, Dick and Rick, are one of the strongest examples of a father loving his son.

[Story taken from a Sport Illustrated Article]
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.

Since then Dick and Rick have competed in 212 Triathlons and many more marathons. In fact, in 1992 Dick and Rick came in 5,083rd place out of over 20,000 starters in the Bost Marathon. Their best time was 2 hours, 40 Minutes only 35 minutes short of the world record. Did we mention Dick was pushing his 110lb. son while getting that time?