What's your Excuse?

If you think you can, or you think you can't--you're right!

This story drives home the fact that Anything is Possible;
the only limitations are those you acknowledge.

Here's to a fuller experience and expression of life...

Dr. V


Strongest Dad in the World

[From Sports Illustrated, By Rick Reilly]

I try to be a good father. Give my kids mulligans.
Work nights to pay for their text messaging. Take
them to swimsuit shoots. But compared with Dick
Hoyt, I suck.

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 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.

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 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.

``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 dad 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 this
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 would sit in the chair and I would push him
once.''