2 Valley teams running in Boston
The Boston Marathon has a division for running teams inspired by Dick and Rick Hoyt, the father-son duo who started competing together in endurance sports in the late ’70s.
Dick Hoyt gained fame for deciding to include his boy in everything, even sports.
Upon realizing that Rick had cerebral palsy, a doctor told him, “Forget Rick, put him in an institution. He’s gonna be nothing but a vegetable for the rest of his life,” Dick Hoyt said on a famous “Today” show profile. He refused.
And now there’s a statue of them – Dick pushing Rick in a custom wheelchair – at the start line in Boston.
This will be the first time in years that neither Hoyt will participate. Dick retired in 2014. Rick, 57, has health complications.
There will be 11 duo teams running in Boston on Monday. Most are from the Northeast — Massachusetts, New Jersey or New York. One is from France. One is from Canada.
Two are from the Phoenix area. They don’t know each other. But there’s a chance they’ll meet at
the finish line.
Sherrine Hayward found her answer on a run more than 20 years ago.
She was a new mother with an infant son, and she was realizing that he would never have the sort of life she had imagined for him. Dayton was born healthy but started having seizures when he was only a month old. She could tell his vision was bad, and it wouldn’t be long before she realized he would spend much of his life in a wheelchair.
She was jogging and pushing him in his stroller when she noticed his eyes.
“That’s the first time I saw that he could see,” she said. “He would follow the trees against the sky.”
Dayton Hayward is now 22, and he’s getting ready to compete in the Boston Marathon for the first time. His participation shows that “you don’t have to be the fastest, you don’t have to be the strongest, sometimes, just holding your head up is amazing. Breathing is amazing.”
That’s what he would say if he could speak, Sherrine said. He communicates through body language and eye blinks. His head is up and his eyes are alert if he’s engaged. He can blink for “yes” or “no.” And when you ask him about running, he can point to his legs with his left hand.
Ryan Melzer pushes the 45-pound Team Hoyt racing wheelchair that holds Dayton, an 120-pound athlete who can’t control his body the way he would like because of a condition that doctors can barely understand.
“Sometimes running gets long and monotonous,” Ryan said. “… Anytime I ran with Dayton, the miles just seemed to fall away faster.”
Matt and Pat
Matt Reines and Patrick Utitus-Canez started competing together three years ago.
It’s still hard to believe Matt can push Pat 26.2 miles.
“January 1, 2013, I weighed 280 pounds and smoked a pack a day,” Matt said.
He wanted to get himself together. A few months later bombs ripped through the crowd in Boston, killing three and wounding hundreds of others.
“When the bombing happened, I vowed to run the race,” he said.
“I feel that those things are done to scare us,” he said. “I want the world to know that we don’t get scared. … There’s nothing that these people are gonna do that we’re gonna back down from.”
He qualified for Boston a couple of times on his own. Then in 2016, he joined Tim Bolen’s “2gether We Live” team.
Bolen paired Reines with Utitus-Canez, who has cerebral palsy.
They hiked Camelback Mountain together, Pat strapped to Matt’s back. Reines and Utitus-Canez have been inseparable at competitions since. This is their first time qualifying for Boston.
Pat has a hard time speaking and he can’t control his limbs, but “a man like Pat who has all the heart and enthusiasm and ‘want to’ in the world, he deserves a chance to be out there,” Matt said.
That’s why Bolen runs the team. There are 300,000 people with intellectual and developmental disabilities in the Phoenix area, Bolen said. Most are from low-income families and about 60 percent are stuck at home without interaction, he said.
This visibility helps more people recognize that people with disabilities have the same hopes and dreams and goals as anyone. Oftentimes, they want nothing more than a chance to participate and have friendships.
The only way to know is to ask. “Two Arizona teams representing in Boston,” Bolen said. “It’s an unimaginable opportunity.”