Hold me close

They will sell them to the Sabeans, a nation far away (Joel 3:8) 

I want to tell you about Dick and Rick Hoyt or Team Hoyt as they are better known. Rick has cerebral palsy. When he was a baby, his parents were advised to put him away in a home, to a 'land far away' as he would never do anything. His parents refused this advice and brought him up surrounded by love, in the family home. It was not easy but Rick was greatly helped when he received a computer that could generate speech. This made it very apparent that he was really rather sharp.

As in many small towns around the world, the Hoyts had a locally organised 5 mile charity run. Rick thought it would be fun to enter and persuaded his Dad, Dick, to push him around in his wheelchair. This was a monstrously heavy device and Dick, in spite of his years as a marine, struggled somewhat. Nevertheless, they made it to the end, 'not last' as Dick recalls. Then Rick said something that change everything. 'When I'm running, it feels like I'm not handicapped'. Just re-read that. Not 'when you're running' but 'when I'm running'. In his Dad's words, 'Something strange happens when we compete', Rick's disability goes away and Dick runs faster. 

Well, that was only the beginning. They started by doing local races, but Rick wanted to do more. First challenge was the Boston marathon. Unusually of large city marathons, Boston has a personal best time requirement for entry. If you don't do a marathon in under that time, you can't run. Dick thought they could go in as a wheelchair entry, but the organisers decided differently. Dick was able-bodied and running. So Team Hoyt did it the difficult way. They went out and got the time required for a talented runner not pushing a wheel chair, then finished in the top 25% of runners. 

Even marathon success was not enough. Next step was the Ironman. I am not sure if you are familiar with Triathlon. It's a form of self-induced misery requiring someone to swim, cycle and run a series of distances. The minimum is called a Sprint Triathlon. That means a 750m swim, a 20k ride and a 5k run. Enough to leave most people gasping in the gutter. The Ironman by contrast requires a 2.4 mile swim, a 112 mile bike ride and a marathon (that's a 26.22 mile run) at the end of all that. The biggest and best is in Hawaii, where the bike ride is effectively over the top of a mountain. As Wikipedia put it, with a certain understatement in my view, 'it is widely considered one of the most difficult one-day sporting events in the world.'

Now you may have missed something in all those figures. Yes, you spotted it. A swim. Dick Hoyt had to tow Rick Hoyt in a boat for 2.4 miles. Now I would love to see the expressions on the faces of those people being passed by someone towing a boat, because Team Hoyt didn't come last. And you may think that Dick was doing all the work, but it never felt like that to them. Dick did the manual lifting that's true, but Rick did the competing. You weren't passed by an old man with a young adult sitting on the front of his bike, you were overtaken by Team Hoyt going full guns for the finish.

Why tell you all this and what's it got to do with Joel? Well, it is a story that has to be told, but I think there's more than that. It is so tempting to send away or put away those who are inconvenient to us, the further away the better. Older people to care homes, younger people to distant schools, those with additional needs anywhere out of sight, immigrants back to their countries of origin. We are experts at sending away, and who can blame us. Caring for someone with extra needs is demanding, exhausting and restricting. Having people nearby who don't fit in can be difficult, uncomfortable and challenging. But something about Team Hoyt can inspire us to see things differently. When we hold our unwanted really close, we both do better. Oh I know, not the way we hoped, but maybe some other way we never dreamed of.

The proud presenter of dad and son's solar system