NC dad on eve of finally pushing his son in the Boston Marathon: ‘There’ll be tears’
Over the past couple of years, Bill Johncock has spent hundreds of hours running thousands of miles while pushing his son Logan in a wheelchair in pursuit of a big running goal — the Boston Marathon — and an even bigger personal goal: keeping a smile on his son’s face.
And while good cheer can come easily to Logan, who has a rare genetic disorder that makes walking difficult and talking impossible, there have certainly been moments when Dad thought they’d never get to Boston.
Barring any sort of spectacular unforeseen curveball, however, on Monday morning, the father-son team will toe the line at the famous race, which will be run for the first time since 2019 after having been postponed twice and canceled once since the start of the pandemic.
It is the only 26.2-mile race in the U.S. that requires the majority of participants to run a qualifying time at another marathon to gain entry, and getting in the way Bill Johncock did is a unique challenge. Of the 20,000 registered entrants, Bill and Logan are among just 13 participating as a “duo team,” meaning a tandem comprised of a runner pushing a non-ambulatory person with a permanent physical impairment in a customized racing wheelchair.
Logan may have virtually no concept of what this all means, but Bill knows exactly how big a deal it is, for both of them — and it’s hardly a lark for him.
In fact, the Hickory-based podiatrist has been trying to run down this dream for him and his son for more than 16 years.
‘Maybe I’ll be good at something’
Johncock developed a nearly instant passion for running as a boy of 13, and it’s kind of a funny story:
His older brother Phil was the homecoming king, his class valedictorian and an all-state football player, all rolled into one. Bill had never beaten Phil at anything in his life, save for maybe a game or two of marbles. One day, Phil decided to enter an 8-mile footrace with some teammates, and their father, Jerry Johncock, gave permission to Bill to run it, too. Phil and his pals charged out like rockets, but Bill caught them and passed them about two miles in — and Bill never saw them again.
“I said, ‘Maybe I’ll be good at something here,’” Bill recalls, laughing.
The following year, his father also decided to take up running, at the age of 50. They bonded over it quickly and deeply, and the year after that, they ran their first marathon together. Once they developed enough speed to go with their endurance, they qualified for the Boston Marathon, lining up together at the storied start in Hopkinton, Mass., when Bill was 19 and his dad was 55.
Even after Bill started having kids of his own, he kept running, eventually logging more than 100 marathons. He pushed his first son, Drake, in a jogging stroller on the weekends. But by the time Logan came along, Drake was on to other things, and as his three kids grew up, Bill bonded with each of them over different activities.
His and Logan’s was running. In fact, by the time Logan was about 2 years old, they were already entering races together.
“My oldest son used to like to ride in the running chair that we had well enough, but ... Logan just lit up — in a different way,” Bill Johncock says. “I guess maybe because of some of his lack of mobility, he really enjoyed the movement of it. It was just like, ‘Wow.’”
Logan was born with Angelman syndrome, which is somewhat similar to Down syndrome in that it is marked by delayed development and intellectual disability.
He can’t speak at all, communicating either via a very limited sign-language vocabulary he uses only “if he’s really motivated,” his dad says, laughing — “he signs pretty good for cheeseburgers, but he doesn’t sign very good for broccoli” — or by either pointing or pulling his parents or siblings toward what he wants. He can feed himself, but he can’t dress himself. He can walk, but not very far or for very long; and he certainly can’t run.
Oh, and one other thing about people with Angelman: They generally are unusually happy. Logan is no exception.
And the more his dad ran with him, the happier he seemed.
‘The best motivation in the world’
As an individual, Bill Johncock has qualified for and run the Boston Marathon six times — in 1984 with his dad, then again in 1991, 1992, 1993, 2002 and 2005.
It was while there solo in 2005 that he got the idea to mix things up a little bit. While at the race expo in Boston, he happened to meet Dick Hoyt and his son Rick, who has cerebral palsy. For decades, they were a fixture at the event, with Dick pushing Rick and the pair inspiring countless spectators and runners along the way. (Dick died this past March at age 80, after having completed 32 Boston Marathons with Rick.)
Johncock was among those they ignited a spark in, and later that year he signed up to push then-6-year-old Logan in the Thunder Road Marathon in Charlotte. After deciding to tie a charity component to his efforts, Bill wound up raising $30,000 for a playground for Logan’s school — the Conover School, which is located on the eastern edge of Hickory and serves children with special needs.
Bill would go on to push Logan through another marathon in 2007, then a third in 2013. But while these other marathons permitted children on duo teams, Boston’s rules specify that riders must be 18 or older.
Logan finally became “legal” in 2017, and in 2019, Bill mustered up the time and the motivation to try to qualify, at age 54.
But he wasn’t totally confident he could do it. In their previous 26.2-mile jaunts, he’d run for fun. To get to Boston, he’d have to run fast.
Boston Marathon officials don’t ease the requirements for the “pusher” on a duo team, so, like everyone else in his age group, Bill would have to run a marathon in 3 hours and 35 minutes, or faster — while pushing Logan, who weighs about 110 pounds, and the chair, which weighs about 40. On top of that, because of field-size limitations, qualifying by a matter of seconds wouldn’t cut it; he knew he would need a cushion of several minutes to maximize his odds of securing a spot.
So he smartly picked the flattest race he could find: the Myrtle Beach Marathon, on March 2, 2019. It most definitely was no cakewalk.
Starting, stopping and starting again
“A lot of times when I’m pushing Logan, I’m kind of playing with him and singing to him, even though nobody on this earth likes to hear me sing except for Logan. But he laughs and we have a good time,” Bill says. “Well, that day, I wasn’t singing much.”
“Honestly, I didn’t think there was a way that I was gonna be able to qualify, especially the first time trying to do that. Just on paper, me trying to run a 3:30 marathon while pushing an extra 150 pounds, I would have said there was no way. ... But I had the best motivation in the world in front of me. He’s the motivation that allowed me to do that.”
Bill fought through leg cramps, ultimately finishing in 3 hours, 30 minutes and 53 seconds.
And when he went to lift Logan out of the chair, Logan made it clear he wanted to stay seated. “He looked at me as if to say, ‘Come on, Dad, let’s go for some more!’” Bill says, laughing. “I’m like, ‘No, dude — not today. I’m pretty cooked.”
At that point, Bill figured he wouldn’t have to run that far pushing Logan again till the 2020 Boston Marathon, then set for April 2020.
Just over a month before the race, however, as COVID began to establish a foothold in the U.S., the race was pushed back to September. As the pandemic worsened, in May, officials decided to scrap plans for the race entirely for 2020. Then last fall, organizers announced that the 2021 Boston Marathon would not be held in April as normal, but in October.
Upon hearing the news that the field size would be reduced from 30,000 to 20,000, Bill felt certain their time from Myrtle Beach wouldn’t get them into the race.
“Yeah, it kind of crosses your mind,” Bill says, when asked whether he started to wonder if the dream he had for him and his son might never come true. “Because you just never know. ... But our mantra with Logan — we always talk about resiliency in the midst of adversity as far as just his daily life. There are no guarantees in life, but we’re gonna control what we can control.”
So Bill whipped himself back into shape, entered a marathon in March in Chesapeake, Va., and — just over two months shy of his 57th birthday — pushed Logan and the chair for another 26.2 miles.
They finished in 3:25:35. It was enough to secure them a spot.
The finish line is in sight
It’s a special situation for the Johncocks in more ways than one.
According to Chris Lotsbom, communications manager for the Boston Athletic Association, the organizer of the Boston Marathon, Monday’s race will feature just 13 duo teams. Only 10 of those feature runners who ran qualifying times, Bill and Logan included, while the other three have been provided with invitational entries via the event’s charity program.
Those duo teams, along with the wheelchair division, will start slightly ahead of the rest of the field on Monday, at 8:30 a.m. (with Dick Hoyt’s middle son serving as the official race starter for those divisions, by the way).
But, as in their past races, Bill and Logan will run the exact same course from the town of Hopkinton, Mass., to the city of Boston as the other 20,000 runners, with the same throngs of spectators cheering for them from the roadsides and the same brutal hills awaiting them in Newton on the back half of the course.
It is the cheering spectators that Bill is looking forward to introducing his son to more. “Even in a small local 5K, you know, if there are crowds towards the end or people there, Logan loves to hear the cheering,” Bill says.
And although Bill’s 93-year-old father wasn’t able to travel from his hometown in Minnesota for the race as hoped, he and Logan will still have six other family members — including Bill’s wife/Logan’s mom Carol — waiting to support them at the famed Boylston Street finish line to see the dream run completed.
At long last.
“I’m sure there’ll be tears as we cross that finish line,” Bill says. “I don’t think that Logan necessarily through his mental capacity has the ability to necessarily process all of that, but I know us as his family — as the ones that love Logan — are gonna be just overjoyed by just finally having that opportunity that we’ve longed for for so long to come to fruition. ...
“Look, Logan’s not gonna get married, he’s not gonna have kids, he’s not gonna experience some of those other significant life events that most of us could potentially look forward to. But this is gonna be a life event that we as a family can definitely say, hey, we’re gonna be here for him.”
“This is our opportunity,” Bill Johncock says, “to still celebrate Logan.”
This is an updated version of a story that was originally published on March 13, 2000.
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