Crossing the country for ALS
Trio of friends, cyclists raise money for Lou Gehrig’s disease

Steamboat Springs — As they reached mile 1,450 of a 2,600-mile, cross-country bike tour Wednesday, three friends pulled into Concordia Lutheran Church to spend the night.

It was a familiar stopping point — with no sleeping bags, no tents and only one change of clothes, the spartan travelers have recently found refuge in a network of churches across the nation.

Mark Price, 22, and 23-year-olds Jon Lugar and Nic Huffman hit Steamboat Springs in about the middle of their cycling trip from Indianapolis to San Francisco. Recent graduates from Anderson University in Indiana, they are traveling as cheaply as possible as they pedal to raise money for ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

After a friend’s grandfather died from the progressive, non-treatable disease, the three friends decided to raise money for ALS research before they hit the road. They said they ran into bureaucratic pitfalls in an attempt to gain corporate sponsorship, but they did manage to raise nearly $1,000 from individual sponsors before they began riding on June 15, and they hope to raise more after the ride is finished July 31.

At first, they tried to use only Church of God churches to rest during the night, because their college is affiliated with the church. However, the trio soon expanded to all denominations. Their strategy has paid off, as they have had to sleep in hotels only twice during the trip.

Steamboat Springs also provided the trio their first chance to speak with a person afflicted with ALS. They said they had met many people who had lost friends or family to the disease, but Steamboat’s Larry Stevenson put ALS in a new perspective.

“Larry’s the first person we have come across who has the disease, instead of people with a family member who died from it,” Huffman said. “We appreciated the chance to talk to him.”

Stevenson, who was diagnosed with ALS in 1998 and has been in a wheelchair for the past three years, met with the men briefly and thanked them for their fundraising efforts. Before he contracted the disease, Stevenson was an owner of Alpine Insurance.

Stevenson said he was happy the trio was raising money for the disease. He said that although gene therapy and stem cell research have shown progress in finding a treatment for ALS, a cure has not yet been discovered.

Kansas tough

Price began marking out the trip’s route early in 2008. The path has taken them through small towns in Indiana, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri, Kansas and now Colorado.

Huffman said the most difficult segment of the trip surprised them.

“Northeastern Kansas was easily the most difficult,” he said. “It was very hilly, and I wasn’t expecting that.”

The three agreed that the mountains of Colorado were easier in comparison because there was beautiful scenery to distract them as they rode.

“We didn’t expect any town this big to be in the middle of the mountains,” Price said. Steamboat was the third largest town they have passed through along the ride, behind only Denver and Quincy, Ill.

They have stopped for only one day, when they joined a friend to watch a Colorado Rockies baseball game July 4. They also will stop on the Nevada and California border for an extra day at Lake Tahoe for some cliff diving but are on an otherwise tight schedule. They plan to arrive in San Francisco on Aug. 1 and have a plane ticket booked to return home Aug. 8. On Aug. 11, Price will begin medical school at Ohio State University. Huffman will begin as a track coach at Anderson shortly after that.

They are traveling from at least 26 to more than 100 miles a day. They plan to follow U.S. Highway 40 through the remainder of Colorado, ride to Salt Lake City and then break south through Northern Nevada on their way to the coast.

“We plan to get to the ocean and say ‘Well, that’s as far as we can go,’” Huffman said.

— To reach Zach Fridell, call 871-4208

or e-mail zfridell@steamboatpilot.com

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