Will He Be a Big Wheel on Campus?

For Michael Landrigan, being accepted to the graduate mathematics program at UCI was the easy part. Getting to the Irvine campus was a bit more difficult.

An exhausted Landrigan arrived at the campus Thursday on the mountain bike he had pedaled 3,600 miles from his hometown of Sunapee, N.H., across plains, mountains and deserts.

Landrigan, 24, rode up to the Physical Sciences Building at 11:15 a.m., two months and eight days after he said goodbye to friends and family in New England. Looking tanned and toned, the cyclist hopped off the bike and called home to say he had arrived safely.

His mother had been awaiting the call. “I was relieved he was safe,” Philomena Landrigan said Thursday. “It’s been a long sixty-something days.”

Michael Landrigan had first planned to hitch a ride with a friend who was driving to Sacramento. Instead, he decided to buy a $970 Cannondale touring bike to take him West.

“People asked me if I was bored, stupid or crazy,” Landrigan said. “Part of it was the challenge; part of it was a neat way to see the country.”

Landrigan was concerned that he would lack the physical endurance for such a venture, and he did no training beforehand. But he decided to try it anyway.

“There were some days I wanted to throw my bike down a cliff,” Landrigan said.

The weather was not always kind. In Wyoming, he encountered fierce head winds, and his entire trip across Iowa was made in the rain. In Wisconsin, a wild boar attacked his campsite and ate his entire supply of granola bars.

“In Provo, Utah, I almost decided to take a bus. I was getting kind of lonely, and I was fed up with biking,” he said. But he kept going.

On Tuesday, he reached Barstow. On Wednesday, San Bernardino.

Early Thursday morning he called college administrators from Fullerton to tell them that he hoped to arrive by 11 a.m.

Kimberly McKinney, UCI’s graduate student coordinator for the mathematics department, said: “Mathematicians usually are pretty dry people, but I thought Michael must be way cool if he’s coming on a bike.” She and others from the department turned out to welcome him.

Having made the coast-to-coast trip, Landrigan said he plans to park his bike for a while. “Maybe I’ll do a ride up the coast,” he said, “but nothing as long as this.”