My friend sent me this. I have tried to be a good dad in my own situation but this makes me really feel like a terrible father!!! I don't think there are many fathers like Dick Hoyt.... Actually this makes me feel like I really suck as a dad compared to him.

85 times he has pushed his disabled son, Rick, 26.2 miles in marathons. Eight times he's not only pushed him 26.2 miles in a wheelchair but also towed him 2.4 miles in a small boat while swimming and pedaled him 112 miles in a seat on the handlebars--all in the same day. Dick's also pulled him cross-country skiing, taken him on his back mountain climbing and once hauled him across the U.S. on a bike.

What has Rick done for his father? Not much--except save his life. This love story began in Winchester, Mass., 43 years ago, when Rick was strangled by the umbilical cord during birth, leaving him brain-damaged and unable to control his limbs.``He'll be a vegetable the rest of his life;'' Dick says doctors told him and his wife, Judy, when Rick was nine months old. ``Put him in an institution.''But the Hoyts would not believe the doctors. They noticed the way Rick's eyes followed them around the room. When Rick was 11 they took him to the engineering department at Tufts University and asked if there was anything to help the boy communicate. ``No way,'' Dick says he was told. ``There's nothing going on in his brain.''"Tell him a joke,'' Dick countered. They did. Rick laughed. Turns out a lot was going on in his brain.

They hooked Rick up to a computer that allowed him to control the cursor by touching a switch with the side of his head, Rick was finally able to communicate. When he was hooked up he actually started to communicate. He told his dad he wanted to run. He wanted to race with his dad. How was Dick who was out or shape and never ran' more than a mile at a time, going to push his son five miles in a local charity race? Still, he tried. ``Then it was me who was handicapped,'' Dick says. ``I was sore for two weeks.''That day changed Rick's life. ``Dad,'' he typed, ``when we were running, it felt like I wasn't disabled anymore!''And that sentence changed Dick's life.

He became obsessed with giving Rick that feeling as often as he could. He got into such hard-belly shape that he and Rick were ready to try the 1979 Boston Marathon.``No way,'' Dick was told by a race official. The Hoyts weren't quite a single runner, and they weren't quite a wheelchair competitor. But in 1983 they ran another marathon so fast they made the qualifying time for Boston the following year. Then somebody said, ``Hey, Dick, why not a triathlon? ''How's a guy who never learned to swim and hadn't ridden a bike since he was six going to haul his 110-pound kid through a triathlon? Still, Dick tried. Now they've done 212 triathlons, including four grueling 15-hour Ironmans in Hawaii.

Hey, Dick, why not see how you'd do on your own? ``No way,'' he says. Dick does it purely for "the awesome feeling'' he gets seeing Rick with a cantaloupe smile as they run, swim and ride together. This year, at ages 65 and 43, Dick and Rick finished their 24th Boston Marathon, in 5,083rd place out of more than 20,000 starters. Their best time'? Two hours, 40 minutes in 1992--only 35 minutes off the world record, which, in case you don't keep track of these things, happens to be held by a guy who was not pushing another man in a wheelchair at the time. "No question about it,'' Rick types. "My dad is the Father of the Century". Dick got something else out of all this too.

Two years ago he had a mild heart attack during a race. Doctors found that one of his arteries was 95% clogged. "If you hadn't been in such great shape,'' one doctor told him, "you probably would've died 15 years ago." 'So, in a way, Dick and Rick saved each other's life.

On Father's day rick buys his dad dinner. But the thing he really wants to give him is a gift he can never buy. "The thing I'd most like,'' Rick types, "is that my dad sit in the chair and I push him once.''
(Thanks ESPN for the heart warming story)

This video just really explains how the relationship between father and son should be!!! I guess as parents we need to evaluate our relationships with our children every once in a while. It doesn't matter if you live with your children or not. A parent is a parent.