A UNIQUE MARATHONER : HIS DAD IS BEHIND HIM ALL THE WAY : Rick Hoyt, a Quadriplegic With Almost No Control Over His Arms and Legs, Can Race in Marathons, Thanks to a Guiding Force

WASHINGTON —  Occasionally in recent years, residents of Westfield, a small south central Massachusetts community, were able to observe a strange athletic ritual. A short, barrel-chested man, built more like a fullback than a distance runner, would run down their quiet, tree-lined roads, pushing what looked like a chariot on wheels, weighted down with a bag of concrete.

“People would stop their cars and look,” Dick Hoyt says, laughing. “I’m sure they were thinking, ‘There goes another loony.’ ”

But it wasn’t another loony. It was just Hoyt training for another marathon.

Hoyt doesn’t do his workouts quite like anyone else because he doesn’t compete quite like anyone else. He never races alone. Whenever there is a number pinned to his singlet, his son Rick is with him.

Rick, 24, has cerebral palsy and sits in the chair pushed by his father. He is a quadriplegic with almost no control over his limbs. He cannot walk or talk. He cannot feed himself.

But the disease has not impaired his intelligence, his eyesight or his hearing. He can nod in response to questions and he can flail his arms when he is angry. He can see the scenery along every course and he can hear the crowd when it cheers.

And he can smile. Whenever he and his father cross a finish line, he is always smiling--a huge, ear-to-ear grin.

The image of the Hoyts in races--Dick bent over his son, his huge, powerful arms straining against the back of the chair as he runs--has become a familiar one to New England runners. Father and son have been competing since Rick was 16. Last June they tried their first triathlon. And every year they run the Boston Marathon, their favorite event.

Rick goes to school in Boston, about 70 miles from Holland, where the Hoyts--Judy is Dick’s spirited wife--moved two years ago. Holland, about 40 miles from Westfield, is a rural, hilly town with a population of about 1,000, near the Connecticut border. Rick is not home much anymore, hence, Dick’s odd training techniques.

The Hoyt’s shingled ranch-style house in Holland is on the edge of Hamilton Reservoir, a location not coincidental to Dick’s budding interest in triathlons.

A van, parked outside under the trees, is outfitted with a hydraulic lift so the family can transport Rick’s 350-pound wheelchair. Dick has removed the steps from entrances to the house and modified them with wooden ramps he built himself.

Tucked in a hallway is Rick’s special running chair with its newly added bubble top, protection for Rick against wind and bad weather.

The rooms are filled with mementos of their athletic career. There is a table of trophies and ribbons, along with four albums bursting with newspaper clips. Framed photographs of the Hoyts cover the wood-paneled walls. There is Gary Fanelli passing them in the Boston Marathon, and Alberto Salazar with father and son at Falmouth.

The Hoyts have run 14 marathons, 6 Bostons. They have also completed 15 triathlons and plan to compete today in the Ironman Canada in Penticton, British Columbia. To compete in the cycling and swimming segments, Dick ties Rick’s chair to his bicycle and pulls him in a small boat.

They have clocked some excellent marathon times, considering that Dick--5 feet 7 inches and 170 pounds--”carries” an additional 130 pounds of son and chair when he runs. Their best time is 2 hours 45 minutes 23 seconds in the 1982 Marine Corps race here.

Dick has raced only once by himself, clocking 2:59 in a marathon in Lincoln, Neb., last year, two weeks after running Boston. It was the only time he has ever run without Rick, and his heart really wasn’t in it. He says he is not especially interested in discovering what he can do alone.

“When I start pushing Ricky, I get this feeling,” Hoyt said. “I go all out. I get up more for Rick. I want to pass people. I want to beat them. When I get behind that chair, it helps me.

“I don’t know if I could go as fast by myself. I don’t have the desire to do it without him. Maybe someday it will happen, but I’d rather be out there doing it with Rick.”

Dick, 46, a career military man for 25 years, is a lieutenant colonel in the Air National Guard with the 104th TAC Fighter Group. He is stationed at Barnes Municipal Air Field in Westfield, where his two other sons, Robert and Russell, still live.

Rob, 22, an All-State swimmer in high school, works in a machine shop. Russ, 18, a high school senior, lives with Rob. He is captain of the wrestling team and a lacrosse player.

Judy, 45, has taken the wisdom gained from Rick’s disability and channeled it into a full-time career. She works with other handicapped youngsters and their families through the Assn. for the Support of Human Services, an organization she founded.

In 1962, Judy, 19, and Dick, 20, who were high school sweethearts, moved into a new house and were expecting their first child. The future was full of promise. But during Rick’s delivery, something went wrong.

“He was a face presentation,” Judy said. “He was turned around so that he was delivered face down. As they began to deliver him in that position, he lost oxygen. In those days, they didn’t have ultrasound so they didn’t know how he was positioned. They tried to turn him. In the process, his oxygen was cut off.”

She and Dick were told that their child had suffered brain damage, but neither accepted it. “As human beings, we don’t want these things to be true,” Judy said. “I really rejected the fact that anything was wrong with my child.”

Their baby didn’t cry. He didn’t wake up to be fed. He couldn’t even suck from a bottle.

“We cut a big hole in the nipple and had to wake him up every two hours to keep him alive,” Judy says. “Once, after three weeks, he cried in the middle of the night, and I said: ‘See, it’s gone away. He’s going to be fine.’ ”

It took eight months for them to admit there was a serious problem with their son.

“Finally, we went to a pediatrician who specialized in birth trauma,” Judy said. “He tested Rick and said: ‘Your son has cerebral palsy. He’s going to amount to nothing. He will bring you nothing but grief. Put him in an institution.’ It was like putting a black sheet over me.”

For two days she and Dick sat around, feeling sorry for themselves. They went to their family minister. They agonized. Finally, they decided that their son’s place was at home.

At the same time, they knew that the specialist was wrong. Rick would not be a vegetable.

“We knew by this kid’s eyes,” Judy said. “They were bright. When you look at a person with intellect, the eyes respond--even if they’re locked in a body. We knew.”

Convinced that their son could be taught, Judy and Dick brought the environment to him. They ran his fingers over a piece of wood to show him what hard was. They used fur to show him what soft was. They cut letters of the alphabet out of sandpaper, pasted them on cardboard and traced his fingers over them. They pasted signs on every object in the house.

“By his eyes, he would show me that he understood,” Judy said.

When Rick was old enough for school, his mother waged battle after battle with local public school officials who wanted to put him in classes for the mentally retarded.

Stubbornly insisting that he was bright and capable, she fought for the right to have her son in the regular classroom. Armed with a special education plan she had written herself, Judy won those fights. And Rick, who graduated from high school in the top half of his class, proved her right.

Judy believes that society puts limited expectations on the handicapped “because we feel sorry for them” and that society also hesitates to impose the discipline needed to raise a handicapped child to be independent.

“That’s the worst thing you can do,” she says. “You can’t let a handicapped kid own you, just like you can’t let other kids own you. But you do have to give them rules so they can grow and develop. There are so many people less handicapped than Rick who are still in the home, whose parents are still taking care of them. It doesn’t have to be that way. Your able-bodied child will just walk out because he can. You have to help your handicapped child let go. And you have to be able to let go, too.”

Even with that insight, she and Dick have still had a tough time letting go.

“Many times Dick will make plans for the two of them--to do races or something--without really giving Rick the opportunity for input,” she says. “Rick has to be allowed to balance these activities in with the rest of his life. If the other boys want to do something else, they do it. Rick can’t. Dick is still struggling with it. But he’s trying, he really is.”

Dick agrees. “We want him to live his own life and not be dependent on his mother and father. That’s why he is away at school in a big city where he can control things.”

Rick is a sophomore in Boston University’s school of education and psychology. He wants to become a guidance counselor for other handicapped youths when he graduates. It is expected to take him eight years to finish his studies.

He employs a team of students who work in shifts as personal care attendants, or PCAs. They serve as his arms and legs. With their help, he attends and tapes his classes, takes exams, does his laundry, goes shopping, goes out for a beer--virtually everything that all college kids do. In case of a late-night emergency, when his PCAs are not there, he has a switch he can hit with his head that will connect him to a local hospital.

Rick communicates in words by using a specially-designed computer, also operated with a head switch. The machine scans rows of letters that light up when he hits the switch, enabling him to spell out words and form sentences.

When he is away from school--or when the computer is not available--he spells words with a less sophisticated procedure called the Russell method, named after his kid brother who invented it when he was 11.

The system works on vowels, each of which represents a block of letters. The letter A, for example, stands for A, B, C, and D; the letter E, represents E, F, G, H, and so on. As his PCA names each block, Rick nods when she reaches a block with a letter he needs to spell a word. Then she goes through each individual letter in the block.

On this particular weekend, the Hoyts have come to Washington to run another race, the Marine Corps Marathon. They have driven down in the van with Rick’s regular wheelchair and his running chair.

But they have forgotten his computer, so Rick must use the Russell system and speak through Michelle Dawson, a pixieish 19-year-old special education student who heads Rick’s team of PCAs. She has accompanied the family to Washington for the weekend.

He is prepared to answer questions about running and what it means to him, but he wants to say something else first. Michelle folds herself into a chair in their hotel room and props her feet up on his wheelchair, facing him.

“A,” she says.

Rick nods. He wants a letter in the A block.

“Is it the letter A?”

It is not. She continues quickly through the A block.

Rick wants the letter D. The word begins with D.

“OK,” she says. “A? E? I? O?”

Rick nods. He wants a letter in the O block.

“Is it the letter O?” Rick nods.

So far, the letters in the word are DO.

“Is the word do ?” He shakes his head.

She begins again and Rick nods when she gets to the I block.

“Is it the letter I?”

It is not. She goes through the rest of the block and Rick nods when she gets to N. The word so far is DON.

“Is the word don’t’ ?”

Rick nods.

All this is happening extremely fast. Within a few minutes, Rick has made the following request through Michelle:

“Don’t write I am a victim of CP. I am a man with CP, not a victim of CP. I am sick and tired of reading myself described as a victim.”

Indeed, it becomes clear after a few minutes of “conversation” that Rick is an intelligent, independent and self-assured young man who seems totally in control. It is easy to forget, momentarily, that he is physically helpless. Thus, it is startling to suddenly see Michelle scoop him up and carry his slight, 90-pound body into the bathroom.

It is equally disconcerting to watch him being fed. He spits up almost as much food as he gets down, and often sounds as if he is choking--which is a possibility. His mother says she can tell by listening if he is truly in trouble. And despite the risk, she feels it important that he be given regular food and eat in restaurants.

“One kid came up to me in a restaurant once when I was feeding Rick and said: ‘He makes me sick,’ ” Judy Hoyt says cheerfully, obviously unperturbed by the remark. “His parents just died . But that’s the beauty of kids. He does look pretty messy when he eats. He loves to eat and to go to restaurants. You get a lot of weird reactions from people who don’t know quite what to do. Sometimes they put us in a corner. Still, I’ve seen big changes over the years--much more positive attitudes.”

Michelle places him back in his wheelchair after his bathroom break.

“He has taught me a lot,” she says. “I’d never been around a severely disabled person before. When someone told me about the job, I was petrified. I didn’t want to do it. I was very nervous at first, especially because of the non-vocal, being in a room with someone who can’t speak. But now, it’s become much more than just working for someone. Rick is really one of my best friends. I ask him advice. We share a lot. I tell him my problems. He tells me his.”

His father interrupts and says: “His face is so expressive. You can tell everything from his eyes. You can have a conversation with him and he’s not even saying anything.”

Dick produces a paper Rick wrote for a high school class in 1981. “I understand all things said to me,” Rick wrote. “Being a non-vocal person does not make one less of a human being. I have the same feelings as anyone else. I feel sadness, joy, hunger, love, compassion and pain.”

The Hoyts began their athletic adventures one day in 1978 when Rick came home from school and asked his father on his computer if they could participate in a five-mile race. The event was a benefit for one of his classmates, a lacrosse player who had been paralyzed in a traffic accident.

“I had a nutty gym teacher,” Rick said. “He told me to get Dad to push me in a race.”

Dick had been playing ice hockey at the time and running three times a week to keep in shape. He agreed to try it. The running chair did not exist then, so Dick pushed his son in his regular wheelchair.

“The wheelchair was made for flat surfaces only and this course had hills,” Dick said. “It wanted to go in the woods all the time. It was tough. I had a hard time walking for several weeks after that.”

They experimented with chairs, fine-tuning their inventions based on their experiences. They had help from engineers at Tufts University, who also helped design Rick’s computer. Sometimes the chairs wobbled. Sometimes a tire blew. They persevered.

“The first chair had wheels like grocery-store cart wheels,” Judy says. “I remember one vacation we took in the White Mountains of New Hampshire. We had the chair on top of the car, and a wheel fell off.

So we tried to buy a grocery-cart wheel at a supermarket and they wouldn’t sell it to us. So we waited until it got dark and his brothers and I went back to the parking lot and stole the whole cart. You gotta do what you gotta do.”

After that first race, the wife of Rick’s gym teacher produced a photograph she took of the Hoyts crossing the finish line. “Rick had the biggest smile on his face,” Dick said. “That night he wrote on his computer: ‘Dad, when I’m running, it feels like I’m not even handicapped.’

“He’s getting the same feelings and sensations as you or I do out of it. I’m just loaning him my arms and legs. I think it’s completed his life. It’s made him into a whole person. He didn’t really have a physical activity like his brothers. Now he looks forward to the weekends, to races, to seeing different scenery, and meeting fantastic people. And it’s brought us closer together as a family.”

Rick agrees. “I make runners aware that a disabled person can still participate in events,” he said. “It makes me feel not disabled.”

Still, some in the sport are not entirely comfortable with the Hoyts. George Murray, for example, a world-class wheelchair athlete and winner of the 1985 Boston Marathon, feels very strongly that the Hoyts should not be included in the wheelchair division. Because the Hoyts always start early with the wheelchairs, race officials often try to list them in the wheelchair division and include them in the wheelchair results. Hoyt tries to prevent this whenever possible, but sometimes there are oversights.

Murray feels that the rules of wheelchair competition should be strictly enforced, especially those that define an athlete’s means of propulsion. “It’s not enough to define yourself as disabled and have ‘a sort’ of chair,” he says.

When the Hoyts began racing, Murray says, wheelchair competition was still in its early stages. “The Hoyts made for an area of confusion at a time when we were trying to develop and define our rules,” he says. “He was issued a wheelchair division number and lined up with the wheelchair competitors. The wheelchair division is not a multipurpose, mass participation recreational event.”

Murray says it’s OK with him if a race includes a “handicapped” division--such as the one in the New York City Marathon--and the Hoyts compete within that category. “If he competes only against himself and participates for the fun and fitness of it--and a lot of very positive reasons--I don’t have a problem with that,” he says.

Judy Hoyt says she and Murray once clashed during an educational conference in Indiana. Murray, not knowing Hoyt’s wife was in the room, delivered a speech in which he criticized Dick’s participation in the Boston Marathon.

“He made some remark about some guy named Hoyt pushing his son in the Boston Marathon and that he felt they didn’t belong in the race because it was a race of champions,” Judy says, bristling at the memory.

That night she approached Murray at a cocktail party but didn’t identify herself at first. “I told him I thought it was wrong that he, a handicapped person, would discriminate like that against other handicapped people,” she says. “Then I told him ‘that Hoyt guy’ was my husband. I told him that Dick ran a qualifying time just like everyone else and that they were working just as hard as he was to be a part of it.”

Today, Judy acknowledges that she has no argument with Murray’s position on wheelchair competition and may have misunderstood his comments during the heat of the moment. On the other hand, she still feels that handicapped athletes have a moral responsibility to support other disabled athletes and keep their criticism private.

John McGrath, publisher of Boston Running News and a Boston area race director, believes that Hoyt should start with other runners. Unlike wheelchair competitors, who start early because the speed of their chairs could create safety problems for others, McGrath believes that Hoyt presents no danger to anyone.

“I have the greatest respect for him and what he does,” McGrath says. “But I think he should line up with everyone else. I don’t see any reason for him to start early. He runs exactly the same pace as other runners. But he should be starting in a seeded race with everyone else.”

The Hoyts continue to expand their athletic agenda. Dick, who couldn’t even swim until January of 1985, now wants to complete the Ironman Triathlon in Hawaii with his son. Their triathlon techniques are still in the formative stages, though.

“We put a life preserver on him and put a bean-bag chair in the boat for him to sit on,” Dick said. “I have a harness that goes around my chest, attached to the rope which is attached to the boat.”

But it doesn’t always work.

“I did tip over on the bike during one triathlon as we were going down a steep hill,” Dick said. “Just as we made a 90-degree turn, the chair went over and I went over too. I thought to myself: ‘What am I trying to do--kill this kid?’ But he wanted to finish. So I got everything back together and we did.”

Another time, during a biathlon that consisted of a 3 1/2-mile run and a half-mile swim, Dick carried his son in the water as he swam.

“I was doing the sidestroke in a cold-fed spring and I felt his head go down,” Dick said. “He went into a spasm, and a girl swam over him. He sunk and got tangled up in a buoy. I thought he was going to drown. But we got him out. I asked him, ‘Do you want to do another one?’ He says yes, he would.

“I’m always thinking about safety. I know there is some danger. But let’s face it: There’s danger walking across the street. Danger is part of life. And he loves sports.”

Dick’s training is a mix of running, swimming, cycling and Nautilus workouts. At noon every day, he runs 8 to 10 miles or bikes 23 miles. He swims half a mile to a mile every evening. Three nights a week, he does a 30-minute Nautilus workout.

The Hoyts enjoy every race and every triathlon they do. But they treasure the Boston Marathon above all. It is the one event they hold apart from every other because, they say, there is no marathon quite like Boston.

They ran their first in 1980, as bandits, finishing in about 3:11. “I’ll never forget it,” Dick said. “Boy was I hurting. After the 22nd mile, people started patting me on the back. It felt like they were hitting me with 1,000 pounds. I felt miserable. I felt so bad, I didn’t think about ever doing it again.”

But of course he did.

“In 1981, again, we had no numbers,” Dick said. “But nobody said a word. In fact, a lot of officials came over and shook our hands.”

Since those days, he has run qualifying times, easily beating the 3:10 required for men older than 40. He gets a number for himself, but he doesn’t always get one for Rick.

“Rick is the one who really wants the number and to be official--it was never important to me,” Dick said. “But for Rick to get a number, I have to run under 2:50. I did that in 1982. Boston 1983 was the only time both of us have had a number.”

Rick shares his father’s sentiments about Boston. “The Boston Marathon is my favorite,” he said, forming the words through Michelle. “I have a lot of friends along the route who cheer me along.”

He was asked how the crowd makes him feel. Especially when he crosses the finish line.

He begins to spell. “L . . . I . . . K . . . E.” The first word is like.

Then he nods at B, I, and L.

“Like a billion dollars?” Michelle asks.

He shakes his head and they continue. “Like B . . . I . . . L . . .”

The letters emerge.

“Bill Rodgers.”