Father-son devotion

Motek

Fri, Mar 23 2007, 3:24 pm

When Rick Hoyt was 15, he communicated something to his father that changed both their lives. "Dad," the mute quadriplegic wrote in his computer after his father pushed him in a wheelchair in a five-kilometer race, "I felt like I wasn't handicapped."

Rick, now 37, has had cerebral palsy since birth. But he has always been treated simply as one of the family, included by his now-divorced parents in almost everything brothers Rob and Russell did.

"They told us to put Rick away, in an institution, (because) he's going to be nothing but a vegetable for the rest of his life," his father remembers.

"We said, 'No, we're not going to do that. We're going to bring Rick home and bring him up like any other child,'" says D. Hoyt, 59, a retired lieutenant colonel with the Air National Guard. "And this is what we have done."

For more than 20 years, he has either towed, pushed or carried Rick in a string of athletic challenges including every Boston Marathon since 1981 and, most recently, last month's Ironman Triathlon World Championships in Hawaii.

For that event, competitors have to swim 2 1/2 miles through the ocean and then peddle a bicycle 112 miles before running a hilly, 26.2-mile marathon.

In the triathlon swim, Rick lies on his back in a rubber raft attached by rope to a wetsuit vest worn by his father. In the bike portion, Rick sits in a chair attached to the front of his father's bike, and on the run, his father pushes Rick in the race chair.

http://www.cnn.com/US/9911/29/......html

for video of father and son (lower sound since it's a christian song):
http://www.videovat.com/videos......aspx