Cycling
Riding High: Lael Wilcox
In September, endurance cyclist Lael Wilcox crushed a world record, biking 18,000 miles around the globe, but it didn’t crush her—not even close.
The expedition started so humbly. On a cloudy morning in Chicago last May, cyclist Lael Wilcox stood in the cold wind on the side of Lake Michigan, waiting, as a motley array of four dozen other people gathered around her, giddy, sharing what was then a sort of an inside secret.
Wilcox, 38, was about to embark on an intricately planned, 18,000-mile around-the-world ride, intent on beating the women’s Guinness World Record for such a journey—124 days, 11 hours—set by Jenny Graham, of Scotland, in 2018. She aimed, in fact, to finish two weeks faster than Graham, in 110 days.
Wilcox is a highly decorated endurance cyclist who’s ridden every single road in her native Alaska, camping out with the bears and the wolves. She’s bombed her way along a popular 1,500-mile back-roads route through Mexico’s Baja California faster than any person in history, and her proposed around-the-world route, which would include several flights, loomed as legend: Chicago to New York, Portugal to Georgia, west to east across Australia, south to north through New Zealand’s two islands, then finally Anchorage to Chicago via Los Angeles. The ride would require her to average over 160 miles a day. Her fans, tuning in to niche cycling podcasts and blogs, all knew that, even for hardcore riders, 160 is a huge day. And Wilcox aimed to do it over 100 times in a row.
For all the preride hype, though, the start was conspicuously chill. There were no unctuous speeches from bike industry luminaries. No one sang the national anthem. And as for the snobbery that often is associated with the Lycra-clad cycling elite? That was absent, too. One rider wore a tie-dye T-shirt. Another, a mom, arrived with a child seat attached to her commuter bike; in it sat a helmeted toddler. These fans had come to know Wilcox as an amiable and smiling ambassador for cycling, and now she did not disappoint. “OK,” she cried cheerfully, “it’s 7 o’clock! Ready to go!”
Even for hardcore riders, biking 160 miles in one day is huge.
© Rue Kaladyte
A whoop rose from the crowd, and as Wilcox rolled out to conquer the world, the woman bearing the toddler fell in behind her and the whole jovial crowd wended south along the lakefront, Wilcox in the lead, chatty and ebullient, playing the Pied Piper. “It was such a kind group,” she’d say later. “People were so thoughtful and considerate.”
Is it really possible to bike the globe in a cocoon of good vibes? By the time Wilcox reached the Indiana border—about 2.5 hours and 40 miles into the ride—a tornado watch was in effect, and she was pedaling into a headwind so stiff that, when rain began pelting down and she unpacked her jacket, it almost flew out of her hand. She kept riding in the downpour and 130 or so miles into the route, a new coterie of fans fell in behind her. One of them got hit by a Jeep and was thrown into a ditch, where she lay, conscious, moving her limbs but otherwise immobile.
Wilcox helped trundle the woman back up to the road on a spine board, assisted in loading her into an ambulance and kept on riding—east—until almost midnight, soon to discover that the crash victim would be OK; she’d broken her pelvis and her wrist, but in time the bones would heal.
Wilcox covered 220 miles that day, 259 the day after that and then 194 on Day 3, which took her through the hills of West Virginia. On the fourth morning, she woke up nauseous, thanks, she said, to food poisoning, and she spent much of the day vomiting—“off the side of my bike,” she’d remember, “onto my shoes, onto my jacket.”
Though she’d burn more than 4,000 calories that day, pedaling for over 11 hours, she ate almost nothing. Meanwhile, it rained the whole day and lightning cracked the sky—not an auspicious sign for a rider who had over 17,000 miles to go. Still, when she discussed Day 4 months later, what Wilcox remembered most vividly was “a really, really wonderful woman named Leanne,” who rode with her many miles and gave her cookies and gummy bears and also offered Wilcox a morsel of wisdom: “Tomorrow you’ll feel better.”
Wilcox takes a short break on her way from Istanbul to Hendek, Turkey.
© Rue Kaladyte
After Mark Beaumont, of Scotland, set the men’s around-the-world bike record in 2017, riding the requisite 18,000 miles in just 78 days, he resorted to the standard patois of endurance sports to describe his experience: He spoke the language of pain. “It’s been the longest two and a half months of my life,” he told a reporter. “It has been, without doubt, the most punishing challenge I have ever put my body and mind through.” Beaumont, who rode nearly every mile alone, followed by two support vehicles, said he had found himself in some “very low places” and that he shed tears four times during his trip.
When Jenny Graham recapped her 2018 world tour, she too lapsed occasionally into darkness. In Australia and New Zealand, she said, “I would be wet and cold all night and then have to set off again in wet clothes. It was very horrible at times.” Like Beaumont, Graham rode alone.
Wilcox, in contrast, had company the whole way. Her wife, Rue Kaladyte, a 31-year-old Lithuanian émigré and photographer, trailed her daily in a support vehicle. Often, Kaladyte would be 40 or 50 miles behind Wilcox, scrambling to work out their journey’s complex logistics, but the two met up every few hours so Kaladyte could shoot photos, among them the images accompanying this story, and also video for a forthcoming documentary.
Every night the two women found each other once more and, just before bedtime, they recorded a podcast, Lael Rides Around the World, whose episodes, typically 10 to 15 minutes long, are personal and homespun, like the best old-school zine. Listening, we like these two women. We’re rooting for them, and we can’t help but notice how amiable their drowsy late-night voices are, and how hopeful their outlook is.
Wilcox biked from Chicago to New York City in a week.
© Rue Kaladyte
Countryside with Lael Wilcox.
© Rue Kaladyte
Lael Wilcox made it to Chicago.
© Rue Kaladyte
In Europe, Wilcox rode more than 4,800 miles, starting in Porto, Portugal.
© Rue Kaladyte
“I get to do what I love with the person I love,” we hear Wilcox say at the end of Day 4, discussing her around-the-world trip. She’s nursing her nausea at some chain hotel in podunk Pennsylvania, but still her love for cycling—and for her wife—shine through.
The podcasts aren’t polished, and the delivery is very stream- of-consciousness. But in their unrehearsed intimacy, these recordings make us feel as if we’re right there with Lael and Rue, in Turkey or Australia or wherever, and most of the time their gentle observations make us happy. If Mark Beaumont’s circumnavigating journey was an existential sufferfest, Wilcox’s feels, comparatively, like a joyous lark. Her podcast makes the world feel small and friendly, and as her trip wore on, the show developed such a cult following that supporters started to co-opt a question that Wilcox poses of her wife in almost every episode. Gathered roadside to greet the cyclist as she pedaled by, fans began to call out in unison, “How was your day, Rue?” One diehard who met Wilcox en route sported a bike jersey that had this very question printed on the back.
Wilcox’s admirers were easily able to track her progress online by monitoring GPS-equipped websites. In recent years, dotwatching has become a thing in ultra-endurance sports like running and cycling, so that the most devoted fans always know exactly where an athlete is on the globe and also how fast they are moving. Wilcox had many followers, and she asked them to come out and ride with her—and they did so, faithfully. When she pushed through greater Paris, for instance, an orange-shirted Englishman appeared out of nowhere to guide her along a dangerous road with high-speed traffic. A contingent of women joined her after that, hollering and celebrating as they passed the Eiffel Tower, and then Wilcox met up with Kaladyte down by the Seine. The photographer had hired a cargo e-bike to transport her through town for a time—leading Wilcox to chortle later on the podcast that Rue followed along on “a couch recliner kind of thing strapped to the front as the guest-of-honor seat.”
Seen here in Australia, Lael's followers tracked her location via GPS.
© Rue Kaladyte
I get to do what I love with the person I love.
It’s not really a surprise that Wilcox’s expedition felt more like a movable feast than a grim, humorless athletic campaign. For her, bikepacking has always been about fun and adventure. She got her start at age 20, when, lacking bus money one day, she decided to ride her bike farther than she ever had—40 miles, from her college in Tacoma to her sister’s home in Seattle. Riding along, she concluded she’d hit upon “such a cool way to see my country,” thinking to herself, “I could probably ride about 50 miles a day.”
Soon, with her then-boyfriend, Nick Carman, she became a nomad. The couple worked six months a year, so they could spend the other half of the year touring the world by bike. Over seven years, Wilcox and Carman rode 100,000 miles—across Europe, Southern Africa, Baja California and the Middle East. The focus wasn’t on going fast as much as on cultural exploration—say, sipping homemade brandy with shepherds in the Balkans—and when Wilcox showed up at the start line of her first ultra- endurance bike race, an 850-miler in Israel in 2015, she looked pretty casual in her tennis shoes and cotton T-shirt.
But she has always borne both athletic hunger and talent. “The first time she ever picked up a basketball, when she was 8 years old,” says her father, Paul Wilcox, “she sank 33 in a row.” Later, she played on a state championship soccer team in high school, then ran track and cross-country in college.
Wilcox came in second in the Israel race, beating all but one of the men. Then in 2016, she notched her first win overall, at a longer, more prestigious race. The 4,200-mile Trans Am saw over 40 intrepid cyclists speeding, sleep deprived, from Oregon to Virginia without aid from support crews. Wilcox caught the leader—Steffen Streich, a German cyclist—on the race’s last morning. When Streich proposed that they cease competing so they could cross the line tied, Wilcox scoffed, “No, it’s a race!”
Wilcox buried Streich, winning by over two hours, in 18 days, 10 minutes, and thereby stoked a mounting scientific inquiry: Increasingly, physiologists have been asking why it is that, while men can easily beat women in sprints, males’ advantage in ultra events is either slim or nonexistent. In September, a 31-year-old female ultrarunner from Virginia, Tara Dower, broke the men’s fastest known time on the Appalachian Trail, completing the steep, rocky 2,197-mile path in under 41 days.
Two months into her ride, Wilcox made her way across New Zealand.
© Rue Kaladyte
Why are women so good at going long? A 2017 study hypothesized that the answer is muscle related. Subjects were asked to flex their foot against a sensor 200 times, finding that men, with more massive sinew than women, tired more rapidly. Another study in 2022 homed in on lab mice and found that females have “a greater ability to mobilize and utilize fatty acids for energy.” Full understanding of female endurance is still forthcoming, though, and after Wilcox beat Streich in 2016, the victory was so puzzled over in the press that Wilcox has said she felt like a “data point.”
Still, true fame didn’t come to the cyclist until 2017, when she met Rue Kaladyte and then became the star of numerous Kaladyte documentaries—among them I Just Want to Ride (2019), which follows Wilcox to victory at the 2,745-mile Tour Divide race, along the spine of the Rockies. Payson McElveen, a Red Bull–sponsored mountain bike racer, sees these films as “a huge new thing” for bikepacking, in that they avoid shouting, “Look, I did something no one else has ever done.” Wilcox may be superhuman in her capacity to ride 12 or 14 hours day after day, but, McElveen says, the focus is instead on delivering “relatable messages. They’re about the people they meet or the funny food they find along the way. They’re about being fun forward and inclusive and showing the amazing places they’ve visited. They reach a very broad audience.”
I Just Want to Ride has gotten more than 2 million views on YouTube. But the films are just one part of Wilcox’s effort to inspire more people, especially women, to ride bikes. In 2017, she founded GRIT, or Girls Riding into Tomorrow, a cycling mentorship program that so far has introduced more than 100 11-to-14-year-olds to riding. For her sponsor, Komoot, a navigation app, she’s now leading bike rallies that see women covering 400 or so miles in a week over dirt roads and trails. And even in her downtime, Wilcox plays the kindly evangelist.
Cyclist Brooke Goudy, a Denver nurse who’s the co-leader of a group called Black Girls Do Bike, recalls how nervous she was in 2021, readying for her first run on the epic Tour Divide. “On these long endurance rides,” explains Goudy, “there’s definitely very few Black women.”
Wilcox met with Goudy the day before the race started and told her, “This is a journey you can definitely make.” Goudy finished the ride in 55 days, and now, under the nom de guerre Rowdy Goudy, she regularly leads groups of Black women biking into the mountains. “I owe a lot to Lael,” she says. “We keep in touch. She has believed in me even more than I believe in myself.”
Wilcox picked up the pace in an effort to finish one day ahead of schedule.
© Rue Kaladyte
Guinness’s rules for around-the-world cycling aren’t that extensive. Riders are obliged to cover at least 18,000 miles, to travel in one direction and to touch two opposite sides of the globe. (For Wilcox, this was Madrid, Spain, and Wellington, New Zealand.) They can’t tuck in behind other riders to cut wind resistance. They need to lead, and they have to finish the journey where they started. They can take flights, but the race clock doesn’t stop ticking when they’re traveling. They’re allowed to follow any route they’d like.
Wilcox began her ride in Chicago, in part because that’s where Kaladyte’s family lives. In Europe, she wanted to resume riding in Vilnius, Lithuania, where Kaladyte was born, and then continue east from there, through Belarus, to log many flat, fast miles in Russia, as both Beaumont and Graham did. But Vladimir Putin is tilting against the West in Ukraine right now, so Wilcox decided Russia wouldn’t be safe. She chose instead to start Europe in the mountains of Portugal and to continue on through the French Pyrenees, the Swiss Alps and the Balkan Mountains in Serbia. The switch pleased her. To her, flats are boring; mountains are fun.
Riding through Switzerland, Wilcox reveled in the switchback passes. “You just keep going up,” she’d say after climbing more than 12,000 feet in a single day, “and there are these beautiful meadows and then loose rocks and just stunning views.”
Turkey delivered a culture shock. In villages, Wilcox heard muezzins calling the faithful to prayer, their voices bellowing from speakers affixed to high minarets. Riding east into Istanbul, into a ripping headwind, she withdrew from the world, hunching low over her handlebars and tuning into the ’90s workout mix blasting over her earbuds: MC Hammer, Jay-Z, the Spice Girls. “I was having a party on my bike,” she’d say on the podcast.
Like Jenny Graham, Wilcox experienced misery in New Zealand. It was “the middle of winter,” she told one reporter. “My water bottles were freezing, and it would get dark about 5 p.m.” Still, she made it to Auckland, then took a couple flights north from there.
After she reached her native city, Anchorage, on August 6 and slept at her parents’ house, she’d ridden 11,669 miles and was exactly on pace to finish in 110 days. She traveled south on the Alaska Highway, a route she knows well, into British Columbia, and camped out each night—there are very few motels in the Alaskan bush. Eventually, she hugged the Pacific Coast for 1,300 miles, all the way from Seaside, Oregon, to L.A., then rode into the Mojave Desert of eastern California and Arizona. She slept during the day there, to avoid the heat, but even in the dark it was 107 degrees out. Wilcox felt like she was pedaling inside a hair dryer.
In eastern Missouri, Wilcox was still on pace for a 110-day finish and feeling good. Save for a little knee pain early in her ride, she’d incurred no injuries on the whole expedition. She decided to gun the last 650 miles into Chicago, in hopes of reaching her starting point, Buckingham Fountain, a day early. Now she rode quickly. When she neared the arch in downtown St. Louis, there was a little boy sitting beside the trail on his plastic Big Wheel bike, looking eager. Wilcox bent low to give him a friendly wave, but she did not slow down for the kid.
Later, after she’d pedaled through the industrial hinterlands north of St. Louis and across a bridge into Illinois, a pattern emerged. If Wilcox stopped—to pee, say, or to get water—she was brisk and on her own timetable. There were almost constantly other riders moving along in her wake, and they made the journey jubilant, but Wilcox was not about to wait for them. Every second counted. She was on a daunting athletic quest, even if her podcast steered clear of muscle-flexing and swagger. She kept food on her bike and ate as she pedaled. When a middle-aged cyclist named Jennifer Walker tried to ride Wilcox’s wheel as she cut through the cornfields south of Springfield, Illinois, the pro was whaling along at 24 miles an hour. “I wanted to tell her how inspiring she is to me,” Walker says. “But I can’t maintain 24.”
Walker dropped. Wilcox continued on at 24. She wore earbuds and made phone calls. She ate snacks. For her, the pace was business as usual—she was ready to press on at this clip, unfazed, until bedtime. But after Walker caught up to her in a car, Wilcox slowed to a civil 20 miles per hour and Walker got to ride a few miles with her idol. It was evening now, and a fan who lived right on the route was paying tribute to Wilcox. As the two women rode by, he shot fireworks that burst and sparkled in the darkening sky.
Words of encouragement along the way of Lael Wilcox's tour.
© Rue Kaladyte
As the sun set in Chicago, onlookers cheered for a record-breaking Wilcox.
© Rue Kaladyte
Coming into Chicago, Wilcox’s entourage grew. Were there now 60 riders behind her? More? It was impossible to tell, for seemingly at every street corner someone new was standing astraddle their bike, waiting to flow into the peloton.
The herd dominated the roadway, and it moved fast. When Wilcox left the streets, turning left onto Chicago’s Lakefront Trail, she was going 22 or 23 miles per hour. This is a pace that’s usually reserved for ultraserious cyclists, but now—in the suck of the draft afforded by the large crowd, in the euphoria surrounding Wilcox’s return to Chicago—all manner of riders somehow hung on in the chase. There were cyclists in skirts and in cutoffs. There was a fixie in the midst, and an upright commuter bike. There was something magical about this moment that Lael Wilcox, endurance cycling’s great popularizer, had brought on. And there was danger in the air too: Scores of cyclists, strangers to one another, were redlining it on a narrow, serpentine bike path with blind turns.
Two miles from the finish, an oncoming cyclist cut across the peloton. A scraping sound followed, and then half a dozen riders tumbled to the pavement. Wilcox stopped. Would the last day of her ride be marred, like the first, by a serious crash? Gingerly, she stepped into the crowd to check on the fallen. “Is everyone OK?” she asked. There were a few scraped knees but nothing worse than that. The injured stood up and everyone rode on, swooping over the turns in the path as dusk fell over Lake Michigan.
You could say it was luck—every bicycle outing that ends safely is indebted somewhat to luck. But there was also something more powerful at work. In being at once a super athlete and an accessible human being during the entire 108 days and 12 hours she spent circling the globe, Lael Wilcox had inspired her Chicago fans to take a risk—to go out on a limb, as she’s always done. And there by the lakeside, they were learning that sometimes when you go big, things can work out—in beautiful ways, even.
Wilcox reached the trail’s intersection with Lake Shore Drive at 7:12 p.m. on September 11. She walked her bike across the street and then climbed the half-dozen steps to Buckingham Fountain and held her bike over her head, victorious and silhouetted by the setting sun, as onlookers cheered. Then she slipped off her shoes and sat barefoot on the stone steps, eating a takeout supper Kaladyte had brought to her. That night she slept well.