kids that have disabilities a chance to run a marathon and compete in a marathon and get all the excitement and thrill of running when their bodies won't ever allow them to be able to do that by their own by their own bodies so i basically become their their legs and give them the experience of compete in a marathon and getting out there and doing whatever they can so i've actually had some children that will finish the last ten yards of the marathon on their own body power but most of you can't even walk they can't walk how is it that they can well i take them in a special jogger that i was able to acquire and and i find these kids and they ride with me for anywhere from four and a half to five and a half hours so they're essentially experiencing all the trauma and excitement of a marathon but their bodies aren't doing it per se they're just their minds talk about you you are a super athlete right and no i was kind of a normal guy fifty two is like a few people a little bit too much out of shape and too many ice creams and things like that and decided that i'd start trying to train and somehow i decided to run a half marathon and my wife decided that wasn't enough and she encouraged me to try running a marathon and once i got bit by that bug i decided that i would like to actually try to qualify for boston which took me three years and a lot of hard training but i was able to qualify for boston so just so that we may make it  clear on is twenty six miles and some change yeah twenty six point two miles to be exact i don't even like to drive that far i know the first time i drove a course for a marathon i thought this is insane nobody really wants to run this far it's very painful and it's but if you train up to it it's it's a doable experience and i just keep training now i run nearly every day but this isn't what you do for a living you know i didn't for a living i have a team at merrill lynch wealth management visor and have financial planning and clients all around the country and when i go to see my clients i try to run marathons there's a there's a motional side to this though for you in that you went from i mean certainly there's an emotional part about being able to get in shape and do the running but you have had a very good friend that you passed away from brain cancer correct so i he was a friend for twenty years and also a colleague business client of mine he g and when i had come back he'd had his first surgery with glioblastoma and i met with him after i had qualified for boston and he was a very dear man and rather in focusing on what his problem was he wanted to know how i was doing and when i told my qualified for boston  me if i had run boston as a fundraiser which wasn't what i want to do and i'm not into running marathons for money but i wasn't helping him and so we did his last event his last fund raiser his last hurrah in life was to do a fundraiser for elliott fund here in seattle we raised quite a bit of money and then a month after well the year that i ran boston he died did that change the way that you approached running it changed the meaning of getting out there and doing these events for me it was no longer the excitement of just doing the event by itself i felt like there was maybe some kind of a higher purpose that i could be a participant in and that's where i got this strange idea that maybe there were somebody out there that couldn't do the whole marathon by themselves but wanted to experience it and so i started looking for kids with disabilities and i wrote letters to make a wish and children's hospital in las vegas which was going to be my next marathon and i just reached out to them and said hey you got any kids might want to run marathons and can't do it and i think they thought i was crazy i mean it was a little bit those are well  an article and we're going to put it up on the screen a marathoner shaped shares his journey with disabled children and i did this because it's a competitor dot com and that's what you think about competition but i got to go to something you said at sixty this is from the article something was missing before running was all about me sixty two running to see how fast i was i thought there has to be a higher purpose is that you that's me i mean i'd i now run i was able to run a three forty five marathon now i run five to five and a half hour marathons and i'm running with people that probably me only run one marathon because i'm at the back of the pack so i'm slow now and but i'm experiencing with people that are really trying hard struggle lean and not only can i encourage the children the families but these people that are at the back of the pack which it's a lot harder to run a five hour marathon than it is a two and a half hour marathon really yes  article you says in the pit any klein found is calling the father of three healthy boys klein decided he would push children with disabilities twenty six point two miles if it's harder is it harder on you oh yeah i'm sure it's you know i mean most of these kids range in age the youngest child ever push was eight the oldest one has been twenty eight and so i'm pushing any where from you know ninety additional pounds  one hundred sixty additional pounds for twenty six point two miles which you know any time you hit a hill and people say well downhill is going to be easier it's not easier because then you're having to break this thing and hang on to it so not only do you  the movement of your arms which helps you run but you also have to push as additional weight and want to finish out the article this is what i thought there were kids out there who because of some circumstance in their life would never be able to be part of a marathon  could be their legs and show them that experience i suspect that you probably get pretty close with the people you're pushing get very close to the kids and i've learned from them and i did i did have a girl stay with us from the ukraine one time who was in a wheelchair she had been damaged in an accident and when i saw the strength of somebody that wanted to come back from being a paraplegic and she ended up qualifying and swimming in the apparel lympics and and getting a silver medal when i saw the strength of these these kids out there i just thought that you know given that and then that chance to run a marathon would be an incredible experience which it is for me so a lot of these kids non verbal they don't communicate through anything but through their eyes or through their their motions their the way they look at you and so it's been very special i build a very deep bond with them how do you find kids do they write you down and say come on marathon with  it's just been serendipity i mean i started off the very first time i wrote children's hospital they had a young boy who had been hit by a drunk driver and he had his both legs cut off he was fifteen years old and  know he was reluctant to run and he actually didn't end up running with me because he couldn't quite get over the hurdle of going from a perfectly healthy young man to be in paraplegic but through that experience i also was introduced to a family single mom who is three young kids always cerebral palsy and so as a backup to my original rider athlete one of her daughters ran with me and she and now i've pushed two of her daughters in three marathons and so now when i go across the country i just reach out to everybody i mean if i run into somebody at a hoss airport i'll give them my business card marathons with needing a safe if your child would ever like to run a marathon you call me i'll take care of everything and it you know as you know stan it's not about money for me i'm not i'm not interested in raising money i pay my own way i pay for the kid's ways to get there and so it's just about giving them that experience  most cases now i'm you know with the the stories in the media and the coverage i'm able to find kids a lot easier but i get on an airplane and sit next to a lady and next thing i know her daughter is three years old was of your cerebral palsy and i give him a business card say hey  around the water cooler at merrill and yeah in fact merrill lynch is going to do some coverage of it they've been really supportive of me financially they've helped me i mean the fact that my career gives me the opportunity to be very flexible and travel around the country that helps a lot so you know when i go to denver i run the marathon and i see clients and they go to san diego so it's kind of like a it's and the ultimate luxury of being able to work in joy your life at the same time so you mean little bit of high school basketball you know one of one of those guys that wasn't quite good enough and wasn't quite fast enough or could jump high enough for all those kind of things but now you're running marathons around everybody yeah i mean climbing with kids races the only the only track work i ever did was when in las vegas i did a hundred mile all trot we was essentially a world record nobody's ever done it before it was not qualified by us one hundred miles and running a hundred mile one hundred miles in twenty four hours pushing children with disabilities the whole time my goodness yes we're going to get to that ok ok but i just that's just amazing in this particular picture that we're going to get up on the screen we have it's not just you it looks like that there's  i of people running with you is that right in this particular picture this is the mother and father of the little boy that she was very reluctant he's eight years old he has severe cerebral palsy also has a trachea and so he needed suction and she was worried about that happening interesting story about benton that you know like a lot of the kids needs help for various things during the race and at mile seven he's eight years old he had a dirty diaper and the nurse was three miles away and so he started fussing and i started running faster and when i started running faster he stopped seen i think he knew that i was doing my best to get him to his nurse as quickly as i could and you would think that if he was uncomfortable he would not want to get back into that jogger right we took him out of the jogger we cleaned him we suction him we put him back in the jogger he got back in and he took a nap and his mom said he would never sleep in the dog or oh my gosh so you know but mom and dad ran the whole marathon with us and and that was the one one child they got out of the jogger at twenty six point one mile and with a little bit of help of his walker he walked that last tenth of a mile cross the finish line oh my gosh so i mean the this is this was at the seattle memorial stadium and the crowds in the in the and the people in the stadium impacts the whole family doesn't it oh absolutely i mean it changes what the families do i mean you know with your normal children you're going to you're going to be protective of them so now take the case of a child that has a disability and maybe a severe health issue and you're not sure how their life is going to be impacted by doing things to let somebody that you don't know take your child and go away for five and a half hours and in an athletic endeavor i mean this is not this is not easy cold weather rain wind elements and so forth i mean a typical day and yeah absolutely so when we ran with benton it was it was the end of november it was very cold that particular day so to allow allow somebody that you don't know intimately in many of these cases i met these families two or three days before the marathon so i don't know them until that moment so we meet at the convention we get together they introduce me to their child they tell me what the issues are with a child i mean i've gone to the start line and a mother will say do you know how to check for hypoglycemia i haven't got a clue where you're going to you're going to take my son and he can be hypoglycemic so you need to be able to check for that in and i got out there i had no issues but eight miles into it we went to the side of the race and all the sunday realized why i wasn't hydrating or feeding this child because everything was done through feeding tubes and water tubes so peter in addition to a nurse you are a friend as the kids i've become very close friends with the families with the children they're sort of an extended family of mine now and most of the kids have run multiple marathons when they already so i keep going back to the same cities and the same kids although it is about inclusion so i would like to expand it but at the same time you know when you want run with ravi down in phoenix you kind of feel like you're abandoning her if you don't run with her again so she's my surrogate daughter in in phoenix and she's run the phoenix marathon we twice and she's also run the las vegas marathon with me wow is your family or your boys ok with this  yeah absolutely you know holder and all of the united states i don't know that well oh we have we've we've hosted kids from all around the world i've hosted over fifty kids from western europe and that's how my kids kind of get exposure to other kids in the world and to learn a little bit about the fact that you know just because we're born here in bellevue in the united states there are other people that aren't quite as fortunate as we are now we joked a little bit about it but you're not a healthcare professional at all no not at all how how that you have found dealing with kids who sometimes communicate as you said earlier only through their eyes they have found a way to communicate with me and i think that i am able to bond with them and understand what their needs are and even other non verbal so one of the stories the little boy in denver braden he he's a very smart little boy although i didn't know that you know because you can't talk to that that's why you confuse the two but because we used the same jogger in las vegas for twenty four hours oh i see ok so i don't want to change it pieces of equipment i wanted to know the piece of equipment i had every every walk she can talk and i remember when i first started working with her she had a i pad on her lap with headphones and she was singing bible hymns and you know and it was a very difficult fun for me the very first marathon i ran pushing a child and it was in las vegas and the wind was blowing about thirty five miles an hour oh my gosh so when you're pushing something like that you can see that that's basically like pushing a sailboat yeah right and into the wind which it always seemed like in the desert was always into the wind and i got you know i i i bent down and told her i said listen taylor i'm i got the first ten miles you've got to motivate me the last the next ten miles in the last six miles i'll get it done and so we're sort of shared motivation back and forth what does that mean well you know i would talk to her and she would talk to me and we'd make sure that we were communicating about what was going on and it gave me motivation to know that i could finish and do something special for somebody like that them yeah i mean understand that the whole crowd is giving them high fives calling their name motivating them in addition to them motivating the rest of the runners out there and so when they cross the finish line i think they get the same sense of accomplishment that you or i would do in an athletic event and i know you were athletic at times in your life too so you know what it's like to finish to make that shot you know there's it's right there s you can't really describe the feeling you just kind of have to feel it in so you're hoping these kids feel that i can ask this whole that running all the movement there have been some scary moments no  mean other than the fact that one time you know i was uncomfortable because braden was putting his foot on my wheel and braking me and i was i was worried about his foot getting tangled in the front wheel and he didn't have shoes on and he didn't start doing this until mile twenty three i thought that was a little strange that a mile twenty three he would have found the front wheel and i had to tell him you've got to stop doing that you got to cause i can't i can't push you with the the brake on and  twenty five you stop doing it and we finish the marathon and the next year we did it again in a mile twenty three this time he had shoes on and he did the same thing to me and we finished the marathon he started crying which made me nervous because you know i've been out there for five hours with this child and now i'm turning back over to his parents and the boys crying and we couldn't figure out what had upset him what had to set him was that he knew what the marathon and oh my gosh so here's a boy that can't talk has never run a marathon before newer mile twenty three was and he knew that mile twenty three meant that there was a very many miles left so it's like taking a child to disney world you know you say well we're going to leave i there's two other kids we have to talk about eric and jackson ok let's talk about them tell us about eric eric is from san diego in his parents are latino first generation mexican americans mom is very active she's got her own gym dad has his own painting company speak broken english i've never met them i met them over the internet i really did internet dating looking for a child to run with me in san diego she brought eric and he was quite and you know he has run three marathons with me now and when i got done she sent me a note in a again broken english over e mail me over the internet and said peter you've changed our family you shown us that we can include eric in our family activities and now they actually go out and run five k s with eric but they they just never took him out and did anything like this before so we donated we don't donate a jogger their family and now they can run their own races with them oh my gosh let's talk about this it's less of a user experience for me and then we got to get to jackson as well kay but the las vegas experience i mean get one hundred miles in twenty four hours it wasn't just one kid though right now we had twelve kids in total so we had a child about every two hours and the parents would they think they flew in every child that i had ever pushed in a marathon flew to las vegas we paid their expenses we posted them we fed them we took care of everything so that because families with children with disabilities it's a very expensive proposition so they don't necessarily in some cases they don't have the extra money to do it on their own so we brought him to las vegas and every two hours one of the parents or one of the child would come out meet me on a track and we ran for two hours on a track all night long and then at mile seventy four brady and i headed over to the start of the las vegas marathon and we finished for the last twenty six point two miles in the las vegas marathon so one hundred miles twenty four hours pushing disabled children the whole way and and and i did put it in for a world record but they wouldn't qualify me because it wasn't a sanctioned race so we use a race you know i think your competition if you're trying to win you win every time don't you yeah absolutely i mean it it for me it's about starting  finishing i mean i get to the start line in it's very tearful experience in some ways and always a few prayers are being said and i want to make sure that that i appreciate the fact that i can get to the start line and that i'm pretty determined that i'm going to get the kids to the finish line vegas if we have the picture up this great that was a pretty happy group of people there that was the team we had other runners so every one of the children that came to las vegas had another athlete did joined us that pushed the kids so every one of those twelve children actually complete the marathon i pushed braden and eric in that marathon back and forth they switched off between the two kids and but there was other athletes who were pushing the other kids who every every child that came to las vegas finished the las vegas marathon and got a medal and i can tell you that the race the competitor group that runs the rock n roll marathon series is very supportive of this in fact they donate all of the passes for the kids which would normally cost me about one hundred fifty dollars a child that they donate that past for the child to have their own marathon medal time chip everything so you have met quite a few very extraordinary athletes and they haven't you i have yes yes one of them is jackson jackson here from seattle again you know just meeting somebody i picked up the phone i called the the local chapter of the national cerebral palsy here and ask if they had a child that would like to run  marathon when the and they introduced me to to jackson and jackson's mom and we met again at the reese convention and she met me down at the start of the seattle rock n roll marathon and as as i was leaving her i asked her i said what are you going to do for the next five and a half hours and she said peter i never get five and a half hours to myself i'm going to go read a book oh my gosh so so it truly is a family experience it is a family experience absolutely something that we were talking about before this show was the fact that when you started this what you started pushing kids you were the only one and kind of like larry bird magic johnson made all their teammates better made running better well i think we've expanded the experience and we're trying to get more races to allow this to go on and rock and roll is is supportive of that the competitor group that runs rock and roll marathons but some marathons aren't used to having rider assisted athletes in them so you know we're trying to bring that message that including children with a disability is ok to be a part of it and to bring that experience to more and more kids so the first year i did las vegas taylor and i were the only two rider assisted athletes participating and in two thousand and fourteen there were eighteen kids they were experiencing that that same marathon now oh my gosh that's quite a growth in just a very short period of time  so and this year we're hoping that we can take the message to chicago chicago has never allowed ryder assisted athletes due to insurance and regulations but this year they've assured me that i want to be able to run the chicago marathon i'll be one of six athletes that is allowed to have a writer assisted athlete in the chicago marathon you know fantastic one of the last pictures that we're going to show is a big smile is that what you get every time yeah these kids are just motivated and inspired this is erin erin has run with me in two marathons she ran both the las vegas marathon and the san diego marathon and she's eighteen years old has cerebral palsy  cannot walk but she can talk so in some ways she's one of the healthier kids that i've pushed and you can see she's not just a big girl do the best you can to help us live through vicariously when you get to the you you know i'm i'm inspired by what has transpired for the kids for the people that are out there i know that i've touched the families and the kids and so many people that in some ways i feel guilty that i feel so good i really do i mean it's like maybe maybe i'm getting too much out of this or and some way well if we want to be sure that you have the opportunity to learn or about this go to the website it's up