NORTHAMPTON — Many would find the idea of cycling from Ohio to Massachusetts in 15 days a daunting, nay impossible challenge.

“Not for me,” said Steve Lopez. “I ride every day.”

He was speaking Wednesday from the lobby of the Fairfield Inn and Suites on Conz Street, home for the night after Day 13 of the 1,000-mile ALS Oxford to Boxford Ride for Hope. Lopez joined the ride to support friends Doug and Dolly McIlvaine of Topsfield and raise money for the ALS Association’s Massachusetts chapter in pursuit of a cure for the deadly illness, known also as Lou Gehrig’s disease.

Lopez lost his wife, Mary, to ALS in 2019, the same year Doug McIlvaine was diagnosed with the motor neuron disease.

“This is therapy for me,” Lopez said of the bike ride. “I promised my wife two things — to take care of the kids and to fight this disease with everything I have.”

So far, the intrepid group of four to six cyclists and several support personnel is well on its way to reaching its fundraising goal of $100,000.

Dolly McIlvaine started out riding but she was taking a few days off after aggravating a hip injury in a fall on the team’s second day. In Northampton, she availed herself of the services of massage therapist Nanci Newton, a friend she made through the Pan-Mass Challenge, the two-day annual benefit ride for cancer. McIlvaine plans to ride it for the 22nd time this August, and Newton has regularly volunteered in that race.

Joining Newton to help ease the riders’ sore muscles was Janice Peterman, a former colleague at the Healing Zone in Hadley, who drove down from Harpswell, Maine, for the occasion with her husband, Mark, a friend and PMC rider who will join the group for the last leg to Boxford.

Team member Dave Foster was the one who got the ball rolling for the ride. A fraternity brother of Doug McIlvaine’s from their days at Miami University, in Oxford, Ohio, he had the idea and enlisted Dolly McIlvaine and another fraternity brother, Rod McGregor, as riders. Lopez and another friend, Giovanni DeLuca, completes the team, and the McIlvaines’ younger son, Charlie, has ridden along on several days.

“It’s been pretty wet, especially the last two days,” DeLuca said.

Doug McIlvaine, 63, — who grew up in Boxford before moving across the line to Topsfield — said he has been fortunate in that the progression of his illness has been more gradual than most. Generally, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis leads to death in two to five years.

Hearing it from the doctor, “it felt like someone sucker-punched us in the stomach,” Dolly McIlvaine said. “All the air went out of the room.”

Doug said he has grown weaker over time, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult for him to speak, but otherwise he’s able to participate fully in the ride as driver and support person along with fellow Miami grads Rick Palumbo and Scott Golan.

The team rode into Massachusetts Wednesday at West Stockbridge and followed Route 20 to Huntington. On Thursday, the riders plan to travel from Chesterfield to Holden, completing the final leg to Boxford on Friday.

Two days from the finish line, the team is looking forward to a celebration — in Boxford and in Topsfield the next day.

“It’s been phenomenal to connect with these guys again,” Doug McIlvaine said of his old college friends. “Some I haven’t seen in 40 years.”

More information can be found on the team’s website, with a link to the blog. The donations page is here.

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