Life is full of figurative and literal doors and roadways. We usually see what we anticipate seeing before we open the door or round the curve. But the most interesting lives are full of adventures brought about by the unexpected, pleasant surprises found behind those doors and down those roads.

While such revelations can come from many places, an inordinate number of mine have been connected to the bicycle. I noted in my last column that 1978 was an especially eventful year on that front for me, and this week, I’ll continue the tale.

When my cousins, Ed, Jeff and Tom, and I first began riding more and further from home, I had no aspirations to do anything more than ride to interesting scenic places. But by the end of college, I found that going fast was fun, too. So racing became part of the experience, as well.

After races at the University of Delaware, Johns Hopkins, Princeton and Rutgers, the Eastern Inter­collegiate Championships were hosted by Penn State in the shadow of Beaver Stadium. Penn State had earned the right to host the race as defending champions, but our team had lost several exceptional racers to graduation the previous few years, including the legendary John Bare.

It was a breezy, but otherwise beautiful spring day, reminding me once again this was one of a small handful of sports that used the countryside as its arena. The course began on the edge of campus, went down Fox Hollow Road and up (what was then mostly) the tree-covered Big Hollow Road.

We believed we had a deep squad of good, if not quite phenomenal, racers that could conceivably contend for the championship again. Teams could accumulate points from three races: the women’s event, the 50-kilometer race I was riding in, and the 100-kilometer event. While the shorter race was worth half the points of the longer race, we took four of the top 10 spots and Lorna Reed’s great ride gave us extra points in the women’s competition. With a big lead going into the headline event, our no-name 100-km squad finished eighth, 11th and 17th, enough for us to hang onto the championship.

After joining my cousin, Brian, for the last three days of his cross-country bike trip three summers before, I was determined to do my own transcontinental ride following graduation. The racing preparation had helped raise my fitness to another level, but I continued to pile up the miles to prepare for the arduous trip. After the awful winter and a cold spring, it helped that the weather finally cooperated, too.

I was climbing like a mountain goat and did a wind-aided solo ride down the Nittany Valley at over 25 miles per hour a few days before graduation. As final preparation for the upcoming trip, I joined my favorite riding partners to repeat the 150-mile marathon to Johnstown and Ligonier we had survived the previous summer. It would be my last ride over the demanding climbs of the tree-covered Allegheny Plateau until the final two days of the cross-country endeavor a month later.

Just a week after that ride, we would be on the Oregon Coast, poised to begin an even more epic journey.

John continues his recollections from the spring and summer of 1978 in his next column, beginning with his bus ride to the West Coast and the first part of his cross-country bike ride. Visit www.johnjfrederick.com for more on his upcoming book which features that interesting year.