Rick Hoyt lies awake but unmoving, watching clear winter sunlight spill into his bedroom. He often spends whole days watching light move across a room, or along the course of a road race—the pale April sunshine filtering through the bare trees along Route 135 in the early miles of the Boston Marathon, for instance, or the tropical sun lancing the clouds that shroud Mauna Loa volcano at the Hawaii Ironman.

He lies on his belly, his head turned to the right, alone in the apartment, in exactly the position that Naomi, his personal care attendant, left him at 10 o’clock the night before. You would think that Rick’s nights would seem endless, but the medication he takes to relax his chronically clenched muscles allows him to sleep soundly for 12 hours at a stretch. Unable to voluntarily move any part of his body but his head, and that just barely, Rick lies calmly, studying the morning light. By its slant and texture he reckons the time to be around 10.

The sunlight keeps filling the bedroom, like April in January. It must be warm out on the streets. The women would have shed their heavy coats. From the vantage point of his wheelchair, Rick regards women from an arresting, navel-level angle. His two brothers give him a hard time about that. They call it a perk of cerebral palsy.

He hears the key in the lock, and then a step in the hallway. Then, “DAA Industry Opt Out.”

At 8 A.M. on this Saturday morning, Dick Hoyt swings his van onto the Mass Pike, heading east toward Boston, 75 miles away. He lowers the visor against the rising sun and turns the car radio to an all-news station. “I’ve driven this route so often all I gotta do is sort of point the van and it finds the apartment on its own,” Dick jokes.

He yawns behind the wheel. It’s been a crazy week. On Tuesday, he was in Florida to give a motivational speech to business executives. On Wednesday, he was in Texas giving another one. Thursday night he and Rick were honored at a dinner in Hopkinton, where the Boston Marathon starts every April. Now, on to Boston. He makes this 90-minute drive to Rick’s apartment, in the Brighton section, almost every Saturday morning. He’ll pick up Rick, bathe and shave and feed him, and then they’ll drive back together to Dick’s house in Holland, a village on the Connecticut border. Most Sundays they’ll rise at 5 a.m. to prepare for whatever 5-K, 10-K, marathon, or triathlon is coming up. They race 40 times a year, in a manner that, over the past quarter century, has become no less miraculous as it has become familiar: a short-legged, barrel-chested, 65-year-old man with a rocklike jaw, running at an 8:30-per-mile pace pushing a slight 44-year-old quadriplegic in a 27-pound wheelchair.

Seven miles into his drive Dick pulls off the Pike to make his ritual Starbucks stop. “I shoulda bought stock in this place 10 years ago,” he says with a grin. The barista starts Dick’s drink the moment he steps in the door—a vente chai tea, extra hot. He has been careful with his diet ever since his heart attack three years ago. The scare caught the extremely fit Dick by total surprise, as have several other setbacks the Hoyts have faced of late. Last December, a gale raked New England, sending a tree through Dick’s roof and into his living room. Days later the lift on Rick’s specially designed van broke down, necessitating the purchase of a new rig. Then, just before Christmas, Dick needed arthroscopic surgery on his left knee to repair cartilage damage, the first serious injury of his 29-year running career. The knee is still healing, and has kept Dick from running for a month, his longest inactive stretch ever. The Boston Marathon is only three months away.

Dick’s tea is ready, but just before he turns to head to the door, he spots the Starbucks’ manager and asks him if the store might contribute to the Easter Seals fund-raising drive he has launched in conjunction with the Boston Marathon. “We want to raise a million dollars,” Dick tells him. The manager pledges his support. Smiling, Dick heads out the door, back to his van, and back on the Pike.

He’s drinking his tea and talking about races and running while changing lanes frequently and making great time getting to Boston. By 10 a.m. he’s steering off the expressway and threading through the streets near Boston University. He parks near Rick’s building, takes an elevator up five floors, and moves down a long corridor to Rick’s apartment. He puts a key in the lock and turns. He opens the door and steps into the hallway.

“DAA Industry Opt Out!”

The athletic phenomenon that is known as Team Hoyt began one spring day in 1977. Rick was 15 at the time and came home from school asking his dad if they could run a five-mile road race together in their town of Westfield, Massachusetts, to benefit a local college athlete who’d been paralyzed in an auto accident. It was a strange request considering Rick’s situation.

Cerebral palsy is a debilitating condition often caused by complications during pregnancy or at birth. In Rick’s case, the umbilical cord got tangled around his neck, cutting off the oxygen supply to his brain and causing irreparable damage. Aside from his head, the only other parts of his body he can voluntarily move even slightly are his knees. His muscles chronically contract, hence the need for muscle relaxants. He can’t control his arms, which jerk and wave spasmodically. He has a “reverse tongue,” meaning he drools and reflexively expels food and drink, so he can’t eat on his own. His head is usually tilted, his smile lopsided, but genuine, accompanied by a mischievous glint. He can’t speak at all, but because he can move his head, he can communicate with the help of a specially designed computer. As a cursor moves across a screen filled with rows of letters, Rick highlights which letter he wants by pressing his head against a narrow metal bar attached to the right side of the wheelchair. When he completes a word and then a thought—a tediously slow process—a voice synthesizer verbally produces it.

At the time Rick asked to run that race, Dick was a 40-year-old nonrunner. When he and Rick got to the event, organizers saw the wheelchair, the disabled son, and the middle-aged dad and gave them a look that said, “You two won’t make it past the first corner.” They didn’t know Dick. It wasn’t in his nature to quit a job he’d started. And besides, by that first corner, Rick was having too much fun. They ran the entire five miles, and didn’t finish last. Afterward, a wild grin lit up Rick’s face. Later he tapped out: “Dad, when I’m running, it feels like I’m not handicapped.”

Dick had a slightly different reaction. “After that race I felt disabled—I was pissing blood for a week,” he says. “But we knew we were onto something. Making Rick happy was the greatest feeling in the world.”

Running made Dick happy, too. A career Army guy, he felt like he was back in basic training again, breezing through a forced march while the other guys struggled and bitched. And, like the military, running was structured. If you followed the program, you got faster. Dick bought a pair of running shoes and researched a training schedule. Judy, Rick’s mother, located an engineer in New Hampshire to build a wheelchair modified for running, with three bicycle wheels and a foam seat molded to Rick’s body. The Hoyts’ first running chair was produced for $35, and its basic design forms the template for all the racing chairs the men have subsequently used.

Since 1977, Rick and Dick Hoyt have completed more than 900 endurance events around the world, including 64 marathons and eight Ironman triathlons. They’ve run their hometown Boston Marathon 24 times, and plan to do their 25th on April 17. With a marathon PR of 2:40:47, and a 13:30 personal best for the Hawaii Ironman World Championship, they are the furthest things from charity cases. Just consider how they managed the 1999 Hawaii Ironman. After completing the 2.4-mile swim (for triathlons, Rick lies in an eight-foot Zodiac raft, Dick pulling him with a strap fastened around his waist), their brakes froze with 30 miles left in the 112-mile bike leg, and lacking a replacement part they had to wait more than an hour for the mechanic’s truck. When the repair was finally completed, Dick asked the wind-blasted and sun-burnt Rick if he wanted to continue. (Rick rides on a specially constructed seat that fits on the bike’s handlebars.) Rick instantly nodded yes. So they soldiered through the bike phase in last place, and then transitioned into the marathon, their strongest event. There seemed little hope of completing the run by midnight, the deadline for official finishers. But feeling stronger as the night wore on, Rick and Dick passed dozens of runners and powered across the finish line with 45 minutes to spare. They had run the notoriously difficult marathon leg in a remarkable 3:30.

Over the course of their quarter-century-long career, the Hoyts’ incredible athletic achievements have made them, arguably, the most famous distance runners in America. They’ve met Ronald Reagan and Rudolph Giuliani, appeared on Oprah, and been the subject of a full-length documentary. In 1996, during the Boston Marathon’s centennial celebration, the Hoyts ranked tenth in a poll of the most influential runners in marathon history—a list that included such legends as Bill Rodgers and Joan Samuelson. Dick has become a sought-after motivational speaker, making 50 appearances a year before corporate groups. Inevitably, after such speeches, Dick will hear the same well-meaning questions: How do you and Rick communicate during a race? What happens if Rick has to go to the bathroom? And, of course, How much longer can you do this? When the questions come up, he replies readily and cheerfully. “We feel real good…we love what we’re doing…we’ve got no plans for quitting.” But the questions, and the implication that Team Hoyt’s run has to end at some point, still rankle.

The fact is, Dick Hoyt can expect to keep hearing the questions, especially after the heart attack, the knee surgery, the missed training. All that, and Dick turns 66 in June. Do you think that not being able to speak gives you a special insight into people?

People can keep asking that question, Dick insists, but if they do, it means they don’t know what drives the distance runner.

A few minutes after arriving at Rick’s apartment, Dick lifts his naked, 110-pound son off his bed as if he weighed no more than a case of beer and sits him on the toilet. Dick is built like a catcher, his position as a star high school baseball player (he had a tryout with the Yankees, who rejected him, ironically, because he was too slow a runner), with a stocky frame and heavy legs featuring such exceptional muscular definition that his physical therapist jokes that he ought to model for an anatomy class.

Rick has trained himself to use the bathroom just twice a day, upon rising and retiring, a boon to his father and personal care attendants (similarly, Rick doesn’t ingest fluids during marathons or shorter road races; during triathlons, he drinks only at the transition areas). Lifting Rick again, Dick places him in the steaming water of the bathtub, where he bathes and shaves him. The water feels good. Rick gives a crooked smile of pleasure. Although he looks childlike sitting in the tub, his shoulders are surprisingly broad. Dick explains that the chronic contraction caused by Rick’s spastic condition, along with the stress and stimulation of his athletic career, have given him excellent muscle tone. Paradoxically, Rick emanates an air of health and well-being.

“The human performance lab at Boston Children’s Hospital wants to study Rick,” Dick says. “His life expectancy is the same as any other man his age.”

As he works, Dick talks quietly about the weather, last night’s Celtics game, and his recent visit to the physical therapist for a checkup on his knee. “Jackie says I’m ahead of schedule,” he says, toweling Rick’s close-cropped, gray-flecked hair.

Dick originally injured his left knee in San Diego last November. The two were running with students from an elementary school through a bumpy field when Dick twisted the knee, tearing cartilage. Then, a few weeks later, when the Hoyts were in Florida for a race, their hotel’s fire alarm sounded in the middle of the night. It was almost certainly a false alarm and another man—even another father—might have turned over in bed and gone back to sleep. But Dick didn’t have that luxury. He got Rick into his wheelchair and humped down a narrow fire escape. While making one of the tight turns, Dick again twisted his knee. There was no denying this injury and, three days before Christmas, he underwent surgery. Thus the doctors’ orders not to run for a month.

Dick lifts Rick into his wheelchair and guides him to the kitchen table. The walls are covered with running memorabilia, including a quilt stitched out of T-shirts from 1980s-vintage road races, and a photo of Rick and Dick being greeted by then President Reagan. Dick pours orange juice into a tumbler and, for the next 20 minutes, feeds it sip by sip to Rick, palpitating his jaw and neck with a milking-like motion to assure the juice stays down. Each moment ministering to Rick requires exacting effort, but his father never seems to lose patience.

“I was never angry or resentful about the hand we were dealt,” Dick says. “People assume that I work out my rage through running, but that’s not the case.”
Rick Hoyt is one of an estimated 760,000 Americans who suffer from cerebral palsy. Unlike such crippling conditions as spinal cord injuries or Parkinson disease, cerebral palsy research currently offers little hope of a cure. Through technology, physical therapy, counseling, and prodigious work, however, the condition can be managed. Perhaps the best indicator that Rick has successfully dealt with his condition is that in 1993 he completed a special education degree from Boston University, though it was an arduous process. A PCA had to sit with him through every class, taking notes, and then reading assignments aloud to him. He had to communicate with professors through the voice synthesizer. With such impediments, he could only take two classes a semester and he needed nine years to complete the degree.

Still, a college degree was hardly what Judy and Dick Hoyt expected from their firstborn when he arrived in January 1962. One pediatrician told the couple that their new son, his condition classified as nonverbal spastic quadriplegia, would be a vegetable for the rest of his short and miserable life; place him in an institution, the doctor recommended, and, in effect, forget him. Judy and Dick adamantly refused, though the first weeks and months with their severely disabled boy were unquestionably hard ones.

Judy and Dick had met in high school in North Reading, a community 15 miles north of downtown Boston. She was a cheerleader and he was captain of the football team. The sixth of 10 children, Dick was always a demon for work. At the age of 8
he was earning money by odd jobs, and at 16 he was running a crop farm. He taught himself masonry and other construction skills. After high school he joined the National Guard. He loved basic training—the order, the challenge, the physical rigor—and decided to make the military his career. The Army placed him in the Nike missile program, assigning him to posts around New England.

When Rick was on his way, two years after they had been married, the couple looked forward to having a boy who would grow up to play catcher like his old man and go fishing with his grandfather. Instead, when he arrived, he couldn’t manage a newborn’s cry. Judy was crushed, and fell into a deep depression. “I hated Dick, and I hated all the mothers in the hospital and all my friends who were mothers of babies that were not handicapped,” Judy says in the Hoyts’ biography, It’s Only A Mountain. “My feelings kept seesawing from hate to denial for months…Rick couldn’t suck, he couldn’t even open his little clenched fists. He was tight, tight, tight. We had to force him to eat every two hours just to keep him alive. We would wake him up by pinching the bottom of his feet.”

Judy soon recovered from the depressive bout, and insisted, along with Dick, on raising Rick at home. She started to fight for her son’s rights and those of other disabled individuals. After earning a degree in special education, she helped establish a summer camp for children with disabilities, and she battled endlessly to enroll and keep Rick in Westfield’s public schools. While an estimated two-thirds of people with cerebral palsy suffer some degree of mental retardation, Judy says she could tell just by looking at Rick’s eyes as a baby that he had an active mind. “His eyes would follow me around the room. My son was intelligent. He was alive inside.”

As Judy worked this front, Dick was busy with his military career, rising through the enlisted ranks to attend Officer Candidates School and eventually attain a rank of lieutenant colonel. Nights and weekends, to pay for Rick’s wheelchairs and other necessities, he moonlighted on masonry jobs. But for all their varied activities, Judy and Dick tried to maintain a typical family life. Rick’s two younger brothers, Rob and Russ, both healthy, were taught to treat their older brother as normal as possible. Rick played goalie in neighborhood hockey games. Dick or the brothers would tie the goalie stick to the boy, then steer him in his wheelchair as he tried to block shots in the crease. Rick would go wild with each blocked shot. There would also be family hiking trips. Dick would drape Rick over his shoulders and carry him up mountains.

Then came that race in Westfield in 1977, and the family’s life changed forever. The epiphany of that first race fed a desire to do other races around New England. But just because the Hoyts wanted to run more didn’t mean they were necessarily welcomed by the running community. At a 10-K in Springfield, Massachusetts, Dick remembers getting snubbed by the other athletes. “They shied away from us as if they thought they were going to catch a disease,” Dick recalls. The race officials were even less hospitable. “The officials said they didn’t fit because Dick was pushing him,” Judy remembers in the Hoyts’ biography. “Dick did it ‘differently’ than all the other runners. The wheelchair athletes didn’t want them because Rick wasn’t powering his own chair, and the able-bodied runners said, ‘You’re just going to get in the way. Why do you want to push this kid of yours who doesn’t talk and just sits in the wheelchair?’”

Judy was there to watch the two at all their races, strongly supporting them through the early stages of their running career, when even some people questioned Dick’s motives. “I got maybe 20 or 25 letters,” Dick says. “Parents with disabled kids saw the stories about us, and they assumed that running was my idea, not Rick’s. They thought I was using him to get publicity for myself.”

Four years after their first race, Dick and Rick sought to run the 1981 Boston Marathon, but again met resistance. They were told that they needed to meet a qualifying time, just like any other runner officially entered in the race. There would be no exceptions, even for a guy pushing his kid in a wheelchair. “The Hoyts were proposing a nontraditional form of participation and, at the time, any change at Boston was a big deal,” says Jack Fleming, spokesman for the Boston Athletic Association, organizers of the marathon. Fleming, who was not with the BAA at the time, adds, “It wasn’t just Rick and Dick; the same thing had happened with women running for the first time, and then professionals.”

Team Hoyt decided to run the 1981 race unofficially, as bandits, and clocked a remarkable debut marathon time of 3:18. They ran unofficially again in 1982, going under three hours for the first time (2:59), and then shaved another minute off in 1983. Still, no waiver came from the BAA. Finally, in October 1983, they went to Washington, D.C., to run the Marine Corps Marathon, looking to clock a 2:50, the time Boston required for runners in Rick’s 20 to 29 age group (even though Dick, who was doing all the running, was 43 and would have qualified with a 3:10). On a cold, rainy morning, they ran 2:45:30. They officially raced the Boston Marathon the following spring and have run all but one since, becoming one of the event’s most popular participants. “They personify the race as much as the elite athletes do,” says Fleming. “Besides being inspirational role models, they are also quintessential New England guys. The crowds love them.”

In those early years, Judy proudly watched as Rick and Dick’s celebrity grew with each Boston or with their first Hawaii Ironman in 1989. Her pride, though, faded as Dick began assuming more responsibilities for their son and, over time, supplanted Judy as Rick’s primary caregiver. Rob, the Hoyt’s middle son, says he can understand how Judy must have hurt. “I think my mother had a hard time with all the attention that my father got through running,” says Rob, 42, who lives in Holyoke, Massachusetts. “The accolades seemed to come much thicker and faster for him than they had with her. She had been everything for Rick. My mother got a nonspeaking spastic quadriplegic through high school and then through college, and now that role was taken by my father, and in a much more public manner.”

Judy’s frustration and alienation culminated in 1992, when Dick and Rick completed a 45-day, 3,753-mile, bike-and-run trek across the United States. Her men’s interest in running had morphed into a time-consuming obsession. After 34 years of marriage, she and Dick divorced in 1994.

After so many years, Dick tries not to dwell on what happened to the couple’s marriage. “I know that Rick’s and my involvement in running and racing was hard on Judy,” he says. “First, because of all the attention that got put on me, and second, because, for all the time she spent around the sport, she never understood distance running—why Rick would want to spend all that time on the road, and why I would insist on going to bed at 9 o’clock on a Saturday evening so I would be fresh to race the next morning.”

Today, Judy lives in Union, Connecticut, just a few miles from Dick’s house, but she avoids contact with him. She visits Rick once every three months or so, but no longer attends Dick and Rick’s races. Her animosity toward Dick is still fresh. “I fear that Dick is going to drop dead some day in the middle of a marathon, and I just pray that Rick doesn’t go down with him,” she says one recent afternoon while sitting in her kitchen. “Why should Rick suffer more, and put himself at risk, just to please his father?”

It’s just about noon as Dick pushes Rick through the parking garage of his apartment building and over to Rick’s new van. Dick had shopped carefully and found the slightly used vehicle, with a working lift, at a dealer near his house. Dick lowers the lift, eases Rick on to it, and then works the lever. Staring into a private middle distance, Rick rises into the van. Dick snaps the chair’s wheels into the locks on the van floor and fastens the shoulder belts so that Rick will ride securely.

Still not totally familiar with how the van maneuvers, Dick spends the next several minutes hassling it out of the garage; the customized raised roof clears the garage ceiling only by a few inches. He must back up and pull forward repeatedly to get past a car that is parked illegally in the exit lane. Once out of the garage, he retraces his route to the Mass Pike and points the van west, back toward Holland. In the back Rick listens to NBA scores on the radio.

As they get close to home, Dick stops at a Greek pizza joint to pick up a couple of oven-baked grinders. The shop owner is a friend of Dick’s, and with the sandwiches he sends along a flagon of homemade ouzo.

Once inside the house and settled in the kitchen, Dick sets the ouzo aside. He purees Rick’s grinder in a food processor and then spoons it into his mouth. In between spoonfuls, Dick takes bites out of his own sandwich, and talks about what’s planned for the year ahead. After the Boston Marathon, he explains, he’ll begin serious training for the Hawaii Ironman in October. He and Rick are both eager to vindicate themselves after what happened in the 2003 race, when they wiped out at the 85-mile mark of the bike leg.

“The last thing I remember, we were gliding into a water stop,” Dick says. “I still don’t know what happened. Most likely we skidded on an empty water bottle. Anyway, when I came to, we were both on the road, and blood was gushing from Rick’s forehead. An ambulance took him to the emergency room. The doctors there were concerned because of all the blood and the fact that Rick was a quadriplegic. I kept telling them he was okay, but they insisted on taking 52 X-rays. Later, I got a bill from the hospital for $6,000. I refused to pay it, of course.”

Hawaii, though, is still nine months away. As always at this time of year, the two are focusing on Boston. Rick and Dick prepare for the marathon by running several half-marathons from January through March. Because Dick trains solo during the week, typically running about eight miles a day, he relies on the half-marathons for building upper-body strength, and adjusting to pushing Rick and the wheelchair. He frets over the missed training.

“I’ve put on seven pounds since my knee operation,” Dick says. “I’m heavier now than I’ve been in years, although the weight should come off pretty quickly once I start running again.” He frowns at his grinder. Watching what he eats isn’t always easy, as much as he has tried since the heart attack.

Midway through a half-marathon in the winter of 2003, as he and Rick prepared for that year’s Boston, Dick felt an unfamiliar tickling sensation in his throat, along with an unusual build-up of saliva. The sensation passed, and they finished the race without difficulty. But the phenomena recurred at races over the next few weeks. Dick consulted his doctor, who administered an EKG.

“A day later I’m driving to my gym when my cell phone rings,” Dick recalls. “It’s my doctor. She asks me, ‘Where you going?’ I tell her, ‘I’m going to work out.’ She says, ‘No you’re not. You’re coming straight to the hospital for a stress test. The EKG showed that you had a heart attack.’ My problem is strictly hereditary—high cholesterol. She said that if I wasn’t in such good shape, I’d probably be dead by now.” The stress test indicated he needed an angioplasty. That procedure was done just days before the Boston Marathon, and meant Team Hoyt would miss the race for the first time in 22 years.

While Dick tells the story, Rick listens intently. His eyes flicker and his right arm jerks in a slow, almost graceful fashion.

Word got out about Dick’s heart attack, and then he began getting calls from around the country from people offering to push Rick in his place. One running club offered to bring in 26 people, and each would push the chair for a mile. “They said they would consider it an honor,” Dick says. “I left the decision up to Rick. He said no. Team Hoyt was exactly that, a team. We would run, or not run, together.”

Rick’s decision echoed one his father had made many times before. Shortly after the pair began running—as soon as Dick’s vast latent talent for the sport manifested—people suggested that he should launch a concurrent solo career. If Dick ran so fast pushing a 140-pound load, the reasoning went, imagine what he could do unencumbered. But Dick declined to compete without his son. “The only reason I race is Rick,” he says. “I’ve got no desire to do this on my own.”

Dave McGillivray, the race director of the Boston Marathon and a close friend of the Hoyts, thought that if Dick had competed solo, he could have become a world-class age-group runner. In fact, it was McGillivray who first suggested that Dick try triathlons. “Maybe Dick has been fooling us all these years,” McGillivray says. “Maybe Rick has been his big advantage, and not his handicap. Look at Dick’s stride when he’s pushing the chair—it’s amazingly clean, he’s doing a minimum of pounding, and with both hands on the chair he’s always well balanced. He’s always leaning forward, even when he’s climbing a hill. Of course, he’s also pushing 140 pounds. If there were a real competitive advantage, you’d see hundreds of guys in marathons pushing baby joggers. But you don’t see that. In fact, after 25 years, and all the publicity, only a few have ever tried.”

And that’s okay, because watching the Hoyts roll down Commonwealth Avenue in the final mile of the Boston Marathon can be a near mystical experience. The roars of the spectators reverberate off the brick buildings and swell behind the two men like a following wind. Dick bears down and begins to sprint. Rick writhes and jerks ecstatically, the screams of his fans shooting through him.

The event in Hopkinton in early January demonstrated the intense emotional bond that the Hoyts have forged with their fans. A local newspaper had gotten wind of their recent difficulties—Dick’s knee surgery, the tree coming through the roof, Rick’s van breaking down—and ran a story that seemed to suggest that the two had fallen on hard times. The Hopkinton Athletic Association started a funding drive and hundreds of people from around the country sent in checks—a poor old lady didn’t buy a Christmas tree so she could send a few dollars, and an anonymous wealthy donor contributed $50,000.

When Dick learned about the size of the gift, his first impulse was to refuse it or funnel it into his Easter Seals drive. But ultimately, given the need for a new van and other things for Rick, he accepted the association’s check for $90,000 and the accolades that came with it. He and Rick had sat quietly on the stage of the school auditorium and patiently listened to a series of speakers. There were tears and testimonials. The Hoyts were made honorary citizens of Hopkinton. A state senator read a proclamation. Bob Lobel, a popular Boston sportscaster, called Dick and Rick the greatest athletes in Boston over the last 30 years, greater than any of the Red Sox, Celtics, Patriots, or Bruins. “Rick and Dick are originals,” Lobel told the crowd. “We will never see their likes again.”

Do you think that not being able to speak gives you a special insight into people?

“I can understand why people always wonder when I’m going to quit,” Dick says, finally willing to offer more on this subject. “It’s a natural question to ask a man my age. But I can honestly say that stopping never crossed my mind. And I know Rick feels the same way. What keeps us going is that we see how much good we’re doing, and not just for disabled peopled. We have inspired a lot of able-bodied people to start running or try some other kind of exercise.”

Like the Austin insurance executive who heard Dick speak at a company sales meeting. His talk on overcoming obstacles, whether physical or mental, so inspired her that she used not just his message but Dick himself to fight through a long marathon training run. “I’ve been sitting here brainstorming the past week and trying to come up with a way to show how much your presentation meant to all of us, not only in our professional lives, but personally,” she later wrote Dick. “When I was running my longest prerace run, 22 miles, Saturday after the meeting, I kept picturing your face, and it truly helped keep me going.” There are other stories like this, too many to count.

After finishing lunch, Dick wheels Rick into the living room and places him in his favorite spot by the bay window, where he can look out over the sloping lawn to the edge of Hamilton Reservoir. His father hooks him up to the computer and headpiece equipped with a mouse that rests just behind his right temple. Now it’s Rick’s turn to answer questions.

Letters appear on a small screen at Rick’s eye level. He twitches his head to move the cursor through the letters, double-twitching when he wants to select one. Each twitch requires a concentrated effort. As he works, his arm waves spasmodically, occasionally getting caught in the computer wires.

He is asked, “Do you ever have a bad race?”

Rick considers for several moments, then sets to work. He scans down the letters, each twitch of his head accompanied by a small electronic beep, like a bird chirping. Y, he types. Then, three minutes later, E, and, after a similar interval, S.

The next question comes, but Rick isn’t finished with the first one. W...three minutes...H...three minutes...E...three minutes, and so on for a half hour. Rick communicates no sense of frustration or impatience. “Yes, when the weather is too cold...” finally appears on the screen. The reply is read aloud, but Rick still isn’t finished. The twitches and chirps continue. And then the full reply sounds through the voice synthesizer. “Yes,” the disembodied electronic voice says after several more long minutes, “when the weather is too cold and the women are too covered up.”

Rick laughs, his face twisting into a grin, his shoulders shaking. Forty-five minutes after the first question, the next one comes.

“Do you ever regard running as an unhealthy obsession? Do you ever think you should stop or cut back?”

“No. By running we are actually educating the public.”

“We may earn commission from links on this page, but we only recommend products we back?”

“Yes. I understand them not in terms of running, but as far as general life.”

"I just think about the poor people in the world."

"I just think about the poor people in the world."

The final, two-part question comes as dusk falls and Rick's father quietly enters the room to turn on a lamp. Three hours have passed since the Q&A started, roughly how long it takes Team Hoyt to run a marathon.

"Was fate at work at the time of your birth, and on that day nearly 30 years ago when you told your parents that you wanted to run? And do you think fate chose you to live such a confined life but also one so free?"

Rick doesn't need the computer to answer this one. His face lights up. His whole body says yes.