By Anthony Reinhart

Keep moving forward, they say, and everything will be all right. As a full-time mailman and amateur long-distance runner, Jamie Parks was already well-placed to affirm that bit of wisdom when he met his one true love, Lynn, in 1985.

    Now, 20 years after a near-fatal car crash left Ms. Parks unable to walk on her own, the suburban Chicago couple has dispelled any lingering doubt.

    On Sunday, they will burst from the starting line-Lynn in her wheelchair, Jamie behind her pushing-at the Scotiabank Toronto Waterfront Marathon. If the 200 races they've run in the past 16 years are a gauge, they should finish well within the top tenth of the 2700 competitors expected. Jamie's note: We finished 161st of 2099 overall. That is in the top 8%.

   "People tell me, 'If you raced without pushing her, you'd probably run half a minute or a minute faster,' " Mr. Parks, 45, said this week. "And I say, 'Well, I don't know and I really don't want to know.' We're a team, we enjoy doing this and I really don't want to race without her."

   Ms. Parks, whose sole duty will be to sit in the chair and urge her husband on, agreed. "He does most of the work, so I can't complain about that."

   In the endurance run of marriage, sacrifice is said to trump scorekeeping as a determinant of longevity. The couple's conspicuous grasp of this might explain why they are more apt to keep moving than stay at home and complain about the cards they've been dealt.

   Besides, it's only practical.

   "We would have to position her in her wheelchair somewhere towards the finish line and she'd have to wait however long the race was until I came around," Mr. Parks said, recalling the early days of his wife's disability.

   Together describes just about every moment of their lives, outside of Mr. Parks' 7 a.m.-to-4 p.m. shifts, since the accident, if not two years before that , when they met at a party.

   "It was a party that neither one of us wanted to go to," Mr. Parks said, recalling how he had nothing else to do that night, and how his future wife had tagged along with a girlfriend.

   "It just blossomed from there and we were engaged within two months," he said.

   They set a date for October, 1987, but five months before the wedding, it all went drastically wrong. Lynn was in a car driven by her brother when it was struck broadside where she sat. Along with numerous broken bones, she suffered a severe head injury and was not expected to survive the night.

   "She didn't open her eyes for about two and a half weeks after the accident," Mr. Parks said. The, for seven more months, "there was no communication of any kind; her eyes were open, but nobody was home. But then, right before Christmas that year, she just decided she was going to start talking again."

   From hospital, Ms. Parks moved into a rehabilitation centre, then to her mother's home. When he wasn't working, her man was there beside her. They were just 25.

   "There was a point where Lynn told me that if I wanted to go on and end the relationship, I could," Mr. Parks said, "but I told her, 'There's no way. You need to give me a better reason than this.' "

   Or, as Ms. Parks put it, "I gave him his walking papers and he wouldn't take them."

   And so, their engagement continued--and continued.

   "She wanted to wait until she could walk down the aisle and I said, 'Hey, I'm not going anywhere, however long that takes,' " he said.  "And it took seven years."

   With her father on one arm and her brother on the other, Ms. Parks followed through on May 14, 1994, and "everybody was crying, even me," her husband said. "I looked like an idiot up there."

   They also looked a bit odd when they showed up at the starting line of a 10-kilometre run in Olympia Fields, ILL., near their home in Tinley Park, in July, 1991. That first outing took 48 minutes and 56 seconds, but two races later, they were under 40 minutes.

   Dozens of 5Ks, 10Ks and half-marathons followed, and the couple ran the Chicago Marathon in 1996 and 1997, finishing in under three hours--in the top 3 per cent--the first time out.

   After their daughter, Annalyn, was born in 1999, she, too, rode along in the wheelchair, helping her parents finish first in three of the 52 races she took part in until she got too big.

   If they finish Sunday's race in under three and a half hours, they will qualify for the fabled Boston Marathon next April, which will be the last of their long races, Mr. Parks said. Jamie's note: We finished in 3:15:24 and DID qualify for Boston.

   "Every day is a new day, but it's not really as challenging as it used to be," Mr. Parks said.

   "If something happens, we deal with it, we get over it and we get on to the next thing. You don't dwell on things...you just keep going."