Boston Strong: One step at a time

On April 15, 2013, a father and son ran a race. The two had participated in more than 1,100 events worldwide–always entered as Team Hoyt, never Dick and Rick.

At 2:50 p.m. on a Monday nearly a calendar year ago, two bombs exploded adjacent the finish line. Team Hoyt had just passed the 25-mile marker, approximately 2000 steps from the ribbon, when a police officer stopped them to explain the unexplainable.

This year’s Boston Marathon will take place on April 21. Many will view it as cathartic. Others will leave their televisions turned off, perhaps still addled from the trauma–the fear and anger that followed before the stillness. Very few will view it solely as a competition. For Dick Hoyt and his son Rick, it will be their final Boston Marathon as a team.

For the 32nd time, the son will cross the finish line a step and a half ahead of his father.

***

Rick was born with an umbilical cord twisted around his neck as if a noose. Hours later, he would become one of the 323 children born in the United States with cerebral palsy, a spastic quadriplegic as a result. His brain cannot send messages to his muscles, and he has never walked a step nor articulated a sentence in his life.

Doctors in white coats offered Dick crayon-colored pamphlets with information, resources for handling the diagnosis and clip-art-smiles to supplement: “He will only ever be a vegetable…maybe you should put him in an institution.”

Instead, Dick took care of his boy and his boy took care of him.

Dick and his wife Judy learned how to communicate with their son by way of a computer that recognizes head movement. They shortened the alphabet so Rick could learn language and boss around his brother Russell. And his parents took him everywhere they went, on camping trips and picnics and mountain climbing exhibitions.

Beneath the diagnosis was just a child. A boy who couldn’t walk. A son who aspired to run.

Like most boys, this one grew up and he grew smart. There’s a degree in special education hanging in Rick’s room from Boston University. When he turned 17 in 1977, Dick and his son–who had always been infatuated by sport–completed their first five-mile race together. They didn’t tell Judy until afterward. When they arrived home, Rick wrote on his computer: “Dad when I’m running it feels like my disability disappears.”

In 1981, they would run their first marathon in their hometown, Boston. The Hoyt’s would forever hold a special connection to the race.

Weekends became adventures, a different town accompanying a different race. Dick towed Rick behind him in a rubber dinghy in triathlons; placed his son in the front compartment of a specially designed two-seater bike for the cycle leg. When Dick lunged into the open water that rimed his beard for a shade under a mile, Rick was feet behind in a boat–father and son connected by bungee cord and vest.

A marathon one weekend, ironman competitions the next–the Hoyt’s have now been racing together for more than three decades. In 2008, after completing six Ironman triathlons, the Team Hoyt was inducted to the Ironman Hall of Fame. It wouldn’t be the last award received by the pair.

The Boston Athletic Association honored the Hoyt’s a week prior to the 2013 Boston Marathon. A bronze effigy of Dick pushing his son was unveiled, forever cemented in a city that exemplifies resiliency, a narrative the Hoyt’s have woven time and time again.

When the statue was uncovered, “Rick threw his arms high into the air and opened his mouth wide as if to release a shriek of exhilaration.”

The statue sits yards from the starting line.

***

Twelve months ago, following the police officer’s explanation to Team Hoyt, Dick called a cab and ditched Rick’s chair, which cannot fit in a normal vehicle. Dick carried his son to the hotel room to find their family. Both knew immediately they would not leave a race that had demanded so much but meant so much more in this fashion.

Team Hoyt will run alongside 36,000 entrants in the 2014 Boston Marathon. Just as the case was in their first marathon and the numerous ones that followed, they will be running for something greater than themselves.

Boston Strong is printed on bracelets and car magnets and paperweights. It’d be damn near impossible to walk through the city on a given day and not spot it somewhere. In the aftermath of the bombing, the phrase was a mantra for a city staggering, helping those to heal. Now it’s an anthem for those who not only stand, but yearn to run.

How do you return to a place that will forever feel more tableau than home? When you walk through Copley Square, down Boylston Street and around Kenmore, will it always feel like a vast and breathless amphitheater? How does a city, keeled over from emotional shrapnel, find its legs again and make its way out of the mist? You start at the source, with a first step.

Sometimes it feels as though our brains are deceiving us. That an entire country could shoulder the grief of its friends, family members, and people they had never met on the same day. On April 15, a country became Boston Strong. The Hoyt’s were there, and in a few days they will help that same city come full circle. Narratives that exemplify how so much good can come from those who were dealt an arduous hand is, in a way, precisely what to look to when recollecting tragedy. It is relief in its most ineffable lens. We look to those who don’t understand their own valor to be valiant for us.

The Hoyt’s provide us emotional asylum and demand nothing in return. If a city is only as strong and resilient as its members, consider Boston as steel-plated as they come. Who knows how many Team Hoyt stories there are, but there’s no denying the world needs more of them.

It all began with a race–steps that turned to miles that turned to stories that turned to statues that turned to this.

A father and a son.

Rick was once asked what he could give his father if he was able, and responded, “The thing I’d most like is for my dad to sit in the chair and I would push him for once.”