WHITEHORSE, Canada — I stood on an empty stretch of the Alaska Highway and squinted north as the sky darkened. I had parked a couple of miles away, at a relatively busy intersection on the edge of the Yukon’s small capital city, and pedaled north up a long hill onto this quieter stretch of road. It was just after 9:30 on a Saturday night. I waited on the southbound shoulder, helmeted and hi-vis-vested, watching for a cyclist.
When a black dot crested the next hill, my heart started beating a little faster. I turned, threw a leg over my own bicycle, and stood on my toes, checking over my shoulder as the dot coalesced into a woman pedaling steadily toward me. As she came closer, I pushed off and started riding, trying to get up to speed so she wouldn’t just blow right by.
I’d been following Lael Wilcox’s progress for weeks. The Alaska-raised, Arizona-based endurance cyclist was making an attempt to knock 14 days off the existing women’s around-the-world cycling record, and when she came through Whitehorse, where I live, she was on pace to do it.
It was Day 77. She had started her ride in Chicago on May 26, kicking things off with a 220-mile ride that brought her to Indianapolis, before carrying on east through Ohio and Pennsylvania, arriving in New York City on Day 6. From New York, Wilcox flew to Porto, Portugal, to begin a 4,800-mile overland stretch. (See her full route here.)
After landing in Portugal, Wilcox rode east into Spain and then north into France, with some astonishing climbing days: 16,995 feet of ascent on Day 8, and nearly 11,000 feet in the Pyrenees on Day 11. She blew through Belgium and the Netherlands, her northern apex in Europe, before zagging south again, still gaining ground eastward as she angled across Germany, Switzerland, and into northern Italy. Her European route was plotted out by the organizers of the Trans Balkan Race, and she passed through Austria, Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Serbia, and Bulgaria before crossing into Turkey on Day 28. Sticking mostly to the country's Black Sea coast, she cycled the length of Turkey in just over a week. On July 1, she left Europe and western Asia behind, flying from Tbilisi, Georgia, to Perth, Australia.
While a two- or three-week endurance bike race might see Wilcox sleeping three or four hours per night and eating nothing resembling a healthy meal for the duration, her around-the-world attempt would require a different approach. “It felt so much more sustainable,” she said later, “because I was committed to sleeping seven hours a night, and I was trying to eat breakfast and dinner.” In between those two anchor meals, she fueled up with whatever she could find along the way: “I drank a ton of Coca-Cola.” It was enough to keep her going. “I felt a lot less pain [than in a race], and I was able to enjoy it a lot more.”
It wasn’t all smooth riding. Somewhere in Germany, she picked up a nasty case of poison ivy, and the weeping sores dogged her for three weeks. “That was pretty rugged,” Wilcox said. “I must have just gone in a bad bush.” In Turkey, still fighting the poison ivy, she added a stomach bug that followed her all the way to Australia, slowing her pace a little. “But what am I going to do about it? It’s not like I’m going to, like, not ride.”
In Australia, Wilcox rode from Perth to Brisbane, hugging the southern coast for much of the way: a total of 4,667 miles in just under a month. The headwinds sometimes lasted for days, and with the bakeries of Europe behind her, she remembers, she ate a lot of fries. Next, she rode New Zealand south to north in a week flat. Just four days before Whitehorse, she had landed in Anchorage and had her bike rebuilt by a local shop. (Wilcox tried to stay ahead of mechanical issues, changing out parts before they wore down, and putting on new tires every 3,000 miles or so.) From there she’d ridden over the Canadian border into the Yukon, covering as much distance each day as plenty of RV-driving tourists.
By the time I was riding alongside her that cool Saturday night in August, she had covered 150 miles over more than 10 hours since breakfast in Destruction Bay, on top of the more than 12,000 miles she had racked up over the previous two and a half months. I figured I’d be able to hang with her for the remaining dozen miles into town. I was underestimating her.
The whole concept of an around-the world cycling record is a bit paradoxical. Ours is an ocean planet, so unless we’re talking about pedal-boating the Pacific, biking around the world is always going to involve some amount of metaphor. What it actually means, in the eyes of Guinness World Records:
- Cycling record attempts have to travel a total distance at least equivalent to the circumference of the equator, which comes out to just under 25,000 miles.
- Some of those miles, by necessity, will be covered by plane or boat, but at least 18,000 of them must be ridden by the cyclist, on the same bicycle the entire time (with replacement parts permitted).
- Rides must begin and end at the same point and travel continuously either east or west; they can’t backtrack for more than five degrees of longitude, or roughly 300 miles.
- The route must cross two antipodal points, meaning two places on exactly opposite points of the globe—in Wilcox’s case, Madrid, Spain, and Wellington, New Zealand.
Beyond those requirements, the route is up to the individual cyclist. And Guinness makes no distinction between supported and unsupported rides: you can set out truly alone, have a pit crew following you in a luxury RV, or strike a semi-supported balance somewhere in between. Wilcox took the last option: Though she was alone on the road much of the time, she was shadowed on the trip by her wife, a photographer and videographer who documented the journey.
In 2012, Juliana Buhring set the inaugural women’s record, cycling from Naples to Naples in 152 days. She opted to head west from Italy to Portugal; made a beeline across North America from Boston to Seattle; crossed both New Zealand and Australia; and then cycled from Singapore through Malaysia, up to Bangkok, and across India from Kolkata to Mumbai (a truly harrowing stretch, from the descriptions in her book) before closing the loop with a home-stretch ride from Ankara, Turkey.
Wilcox was aiming to break the record of 124 days, set by Jenny Graham in 2018. Graham rode east and took a more northerly initial route, starting from Germany and cycling overland to Beijing via Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Russia, and Mongolia. From there she hopped south, crossing Australia and New Zealand, before tacking north again across the Pacific by plane. She landed in Anchorage and rode to Nova Scotia before finishing off with a stretch from Portugal to Berlin. Graham’s route was similar to the one taken by the men’s record-holder. In 2017, Mark Beaumont rode from Paris to Paris in 78 days. He shaved an astonishing 45 days off the previous 123-day record, set in 2015, and, somehow, 117 days off his own then-record in 2008.
The geopolitical landscape has changed a whole lot since Graham and Beaumont built their rides around a Russian crossing—and it’s not clear that it would have been safe or comfortable for queer people like Wilcox and her wife to travel through Putin’s Russia even before the invasion of Ukraine. “I really can’t ride through Russia,” Wilcox said on the first episode of her daily podcast about the ride, while explaining her route. “Technically, I might get some kind of permission, but it’s not a good idea … I want to go to places where I’m welcomed.” Her route made up some additional miles in North America: Rather than heading dead east across the plains after descending from Alaska, she planned to hug the west coast all the way south to Los Angeles, and then angle back up to Chicago along the historic Route 66.
Even though it was dusky and deserted when Lael Wilcox pulled alongside me, on a stretch of road where even cars might be a rare sight at times, she was only a little surprised. From the beginning, she had made her tracker live online and invited anyone to join her for stretches of the ride. Some cities saw whole crowds rolling beside her, especially as she got closer to the Chicago finish line. Even in the sparsely populated Yukon, I later learned, I was only one of several visitors who’d popped up beside her that day.
Wilcox had generally been riding for 10 to 12 hours per day, every day, for two and a half months. The day before, she had crushed 194.6 miles, including almost 6,400 feet of climbing, along one of the least populated stretches of road in North America. When we met up, she was already 150 miles deep into that day’s ride. At the risk of sounding like one of the 12 percent of British men who believe they could win a point off Serena Williams: I thought I’d be able to keep up with her.
Reader, I could not. At first, with the road quiet enough, we rode side by side, chatting. I passed along a hello from a mutual friend, identified myself as a journalist, asked a few basic questions about her ride. But I was soon short of breath; her steady, seemingly casual pace, felt closer to my race pace than a pleasure ride. It was how she had chewed up so many miles, I realized. Over a couple of rolling hills, she pulled away from me on the climbs, and I scrambled to catch her on the descents. As we passed through Whitehorse’s northern subdivisions, I had to fight to stay with her on the flats.
I’m a casual recreational cyclist. I mountain bike and fat-bike (gently) with my friends, and on sunny summer days I like to pedal down the highway to the fancy food truck or the brewery. I rarely ride for more than an hour or two at a time. Wilcox, 38, is a record-setting ultra-endurance racer. She routinely spends hours upon hours, day after day, in the saddle; (in)famously, she never wears a chamois to pad her seat. She’s the kind of person who, when we connected for a Zoom interview after she’d completed her around-the-world trip, could say things like, “That day, there was only a headwind for the first hundred miles, and then it was OK.” OK!
Wilcox is not like you and me. But at the same time, she manages to inspire regular people to get on their bikes and ride farther, if not necessarily any faster. Guinness records are oddities governed by arbitrary rules, flimsy claims to fame that only serve to tempt the next taker. But they can be pegs to hold the public’s attention, and Wilcox has used hers to draw a whole lot of eyes to the obscure sport of extreme long-distance cycling. Tens of thousands of people followed along, virtually, with her ride. Hundreds if not thousands came out to ride with her for part of the way, filling in the gaps between solitary stretches. “In the end, I probably rode with people for half the time and rode by myself for half the time,” Wilcox said. “The fun thing about people coming was, I never knew when they would show up … But I also like riding by myself, so I really never got bored out there.” As one of those surprise visitors, I know I can’t be the only one who ultimately fell back, let her pedal on without me, and went home dreaming of all the places she had been, and where I might ride someday.
When it was clear I wasn’t going to be able to stay with her all the way into downtown, I fought to draw even with Wilcox one more time and told her I was calling it a night. We said our goodbyes and she disappeared down the highway, while I pulled over in front of the locked gates to the Whitehorse dump and called my wife to come pick me up.
The next morning, after squeezing in her few hours of sleep, Wilcox got up and rode another 185 miles into British Columbia, climbing almost 8,000 feet. By Day 95, she was in Malibu. On Day 107, powering through Missouri, she rode 232 miles; the next day, entering Illinois, she rode 220. And on Day 109, she covered the final 193 miles. Lael Wilcox made it back to Chicago 108 days, 12 hours, and 12 minutes after she left—a new record. Until it’s broken, anyway. For Wilcox and ultra-endurance riders like her, records aren’t made to stand for very long.
