One rough rider

A triumphant Hugh Gapay crosses the finish line of the 535-mile Race Across Oregon event.

By Nancy Townsley

The Forest Grove News-Times, Aug 2, 2006, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Ryan Gardner / Visualpeople.com

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At the end of the road, Hugh Gapay was completely spent.

Almost 42 hours after he and his tricked-out road bike set out on the Race Across Oregon – a tortuous, 535-mile endurance test that starts near Portland International Airport and ends at Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood – Gapay crossed the finish line.

Exhausted, the 42-year-old physician’s assistant from Cornelius fell into the waiting arms of his wife, Angela. In turn, he embraced his daughter, Alia, and his son, Stephen.

He’d been in the saddle nearly two days straight, from 5 a.m. Saturday, July 22 to 9:55 p.m. Sunday, July 23.

“It was very difficult – extremely challenging,” Gapay said last Friday, five days after he finished fourth in the state’s premier ultra-bicycling event and qualified for the famed Race Across America, a 3,000-mile, multi-day tire burner.

“On the second day it was about 112 degrees descending into Warm Springs,” he recalled. “At the bottom of that hill I really felt like I was in an oven and starting to cook.”

Rolling over to get some respite inside his support van, Gapay sat in front of the vehicle’s air conditioning vents for a couple of minutes, trying to get cool.

“It helped,” he said. “I kept going.”

Gapay, a first-time rider in the Oregon event, finished in 40 hours, 55 minutes.

“The sheer length of it was daunting,” he said, adding that the course involved over 40,000 feet of climbing.

During the final push, Gapay tried to catch three other cyclists as they ground toward Timberline Lodge on a six-mile-long incline.

“He was pushing them for sure,” said Mike Olson, owner of Olson’s Bicycles in Forest Grove and a member of Gapay’s roadside crew.

Olson and several others made sure Gapay stayed upright and hydrated as an unusually intense heat wave pushed temperatures into the triple digits.

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