BUTLER TWP — Denton Dailey has been an associate professor at Butler County Community College for 37 years.

While the 60-year-old Butler resident has stayed physically active most of his life, he's participated in the Dirty Dozen, a 55-mile Pittsburgh bicycle race ... well, never.

That all changes Saturday.

“I've always been a good athlete,” Dailey said. “I've been a runner, a mountain biker, did all the racquet sports, did motocross, hare scrambles — I just never bought a road bicycle until July,” he said.

Dailey suffered his share of injuries doing motocross events. He gave up running 5k and 10k races because of a deteriorating hip. That hip was replaced in May of 2015.

Dailey spent that summer rehabbing at a feverish pace.

“I treated that rehab like it was a full-time job,” he said. “By the end of that summer, I got back to 80 percent or so.”

The running was out. The bicycling was in.

A challenge was needed.

“I heard about that Dirty Dozen race,” Dailey said. “It's mostly for younger people and only one other person competed in the event with an artificial hip.”

That was Gene Nacey in 2011.

The Dirty Dozen course runs from Highland Park to Hazelwood and encompasses 13 hills. The Canton Avenue hill, located in Beechview, has a grade of 37 percent, making it the steepest hill on a road in the country. It is the ninth hill on the course.

“It's a killer,” Dailey said.

He would know.

Dailey has been working out with the Western Pa. Wheelmen — a bicycling group in the Pittsburgh area — for the past eight weekends. They've ridden the complete course twice.

“The second time, I started around 9 a.m. and finished at about 4 in the afternoon,” Dailey said.

He figures on finishing the race Saturday. The time doesn't matter all that much to him.

Scoring a point does.

“If you're one of the top 10 finishers on a hill, you're awarded points,” Dailey explained. “The 10th guy gets one point, the ninth gets two, and so on.

“If I can somehow get one point during this race, it would be fantastic.”

Paul Salipante, 69, is the oldest person to ever finish the race, doing so in 2014. John Brockenbrough, 58, is the oldest to score a point in the event. He accomplished that last year.

Only 2 percent of bicyclists age 60 or older have even attempted the Dirty Dozen race, which debuted in 1983.

Dailey said he exercises and takes on physical challenges “to relieve stress.”

More than 300 bicyclists are expected to take on the Dirty Dozen, which has a 9 a.m. start time.

“That's the first group. I may wait for the second group,” Dailey said. “I'm a novice. I am not an elite-level cyclist.

“This is supposed to be a tough race, but I consider myself a tough person.”

After Saturday's race, Dailey plans to rest for a while.

“My training for this has been pretty intense,” he said. “I have no cycling plans for the future. My next goal is to get on American Ninja Warrior.”

The artificial hip has not been slowing him down.

One of the riders training with him the past few weeks, Alexandra Shewczyk, will attest to that.

“He keeps up with the rest of us,” she said in a released statement. “He has the courage to attempt the hills, the willpower to get up them and he is really pushing as hard as the rest of us.”

BC3 publicist William Foley contributed to this report