They’ve fought rain, breakdowns and even rescued a puppy, but when the Fuller Center Bike Trip rolled into LaGrange on Tuesday afternoon, the story was the heat.

“This is as hot as it’s been,” said Ryan Iafiglioa, 23, who is leading the ride.

Sixteen cyclists on the bike trip, which began on the shores of Lake Michigan on July 10 and will end in the Gulf of Mexico near Apalachicola, Fla., on Aug. 16, spent the night in LaGrange on Tuesday at First Presbyterian Church in the Eric Brown youth building. The group has been staying at churches along the trip and is grateful for whatever hospitality the churches are able to provide.

“It’s going better than we could have planned,” Iafiglioa said. “We’ve had wonderful hosts.”

Emily Parrish, a church staff member, met the cyclists late Tuesday afternoon and showed them around the youth building before taking a pair of the riders to get groceries for the night. The cyclists seemed most excited about the showers installed in the youth building.

“We will put those to good use,” Iafiglioa said jokingly.

Parrish said the church put in the showers during its most recent renovation out of its own experiences.

“We’ve been on enough mission trips ourselves to know what’s needed and appreciated,” she said.

The bike trip is a mission in honor of the Fuller Center for Housing, founded by the late Millard Fuller four years ago. Riders raise money through pledges for the Fuller Center and stop along the way to help out local partner organizations with building and renovation projects.

“It’s like a new kind of triathlon,” Iafiglioa said. “We bike, then we put down our bikes and build - we call that an off day. Then when we’re not doing that, we’re speaking about the Fuller Center.”

The group is averaging about 60 miles a day on their bikes in the second-ever trip. The 2008 trip was cross-country from west to east. This trip is a little shorter, north to south.

The group wants to raise $200,000 during the course of the trip. About $66,000 has been raised so far.

“We could use some help,” Iafiglioa said.

In the meantime, the group is helping others. Today the cyclists will take off from LaGrange and head to the Chattahoochee Fuller Center based in Lanett, Ala. They will work for a couple of days in the local Fuller Center’s warehouse before taking off Friday morning for Auburn, Ala., on the next leg of the trip.

“We’re doing a lot of odd jobs” in Lanett, Iafiglioa said. The Chattahoochee Fuller Center will host a “legacy build” in honor of Fuller later this month.

“We are the prep team,” Iafiglioa said.

— To donate to the Fuller Center or follow the bike trip online, go to www. fullercenter.org.

Jennifer Shrader may be reached at jshrader@ lagrangenews.com or at (706) 884-7311, Ext. 236.