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team_hoyt.jpgUsually, the forwarded emails from friends are jokes, but today I got a link to a video and a story that is so remarkable I know you’ll want to see it too. It’s about Dick and Rick Hoyt, the father and son team from Massachussetts who compete, just about continuously, in marathons and trialathalons. Dick is 65 and Rick is 43. The story becomes downright amazing when you consider that — althought the word can’t is certainly not in his vocabulary – Rick is unable to walk or talk.


Doctors, many of whom are no longer alive, recommended that the Hoyts institutionalize Rick when he was born after being strangled by his umbilical chord. No way, his parents said.
In between marathons, Rick graduated from Boston University in 1993 with a degree in sepcial education. He now works at Boston College’s computer laboratory helping to develop a system codenamed “Eagle Eyes,” through which mechanical aids (like for instance a powered wheelchair) could be controlled by a paralyzed person’s eye-movements, when linked-up to a computer.