‘It’s just insane. It’s so far…’: Lael Wilcox on her record-breaking attempt to be the fastest woman to cycle round the world

“I’m not in pain, which is unusual!” laughs ultra-distance cyclist Lael Wilcox over a patchy WhatsApp call from somewhere in rural Serbia. She is almost a month into an attempt to be the fastest woman to circumnavigate the globe on a bicycle and, despite being able to follow her mile-by-mile progress online, it’s surprisingly hard to track down and actually talk to the 36-year-old Alaskan.

When we finally do speak, I expect her to call from a hotel, or between mouthfuls of porridge at a roadside café. But when she comes on the line, a little out of breath, with the occasional sound of passing cars, she is clearly in-saddle, on the road and heading east. “I’m on my bike!” she laughs gleefully, noting how she aims to cover just under 190 miles by the end of the day.

A living legend of endurance racing, Wilcox is planning to complete the 18,020-mile journey in about 110 days, which would beat the current record, held by Scottish cyclist Jenny Graham, by a neat fortnight. To achieve that, Wilcox will have to cover an average of 164 miles a day for the next 81 days and expects to be in the saddle for between 12 and 14 hours at a stretch. “Every day is like a marathon,” she says, “and then I go to sleep and do it all again.”

The phrase, “around the world” is a little misleading. You don’t need to circumnavigate the globe exactly but, to meet the official Guinness requirements, you must start and finish at the same point, and cycle continuously in the same direction for a minimum of 18,000 miles. You can take public flights and ferries, but all connections are included in your total time. You can choose to do it alone or with a team, Guinness doesn’t differentiate between the two. Graham rode solo, while Wilcox is travelling with her wife, Rugile, a photographer, who says: “I see Lael a couple times a day to document her ride and have been meeting her at night to record our daily podcast and edit video and photos from the day.”

Wilcox set off from Chicago on 26 May, headed for New York City. From there, she flew to Portugal and rode northeast through Spain, France, Belgium and the Netherlands, before heading southeast into Germany. Then through Switzerland and northern Italy, with a brief foray into Austria, and then across to Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina and into Serbia.

In the few days since we spoke, Wilcox has now left Serbia, traversed Bulgaria and begun the long slog across Turkey’s Black Sea coastline, headed for Tbilisi in Georgia. From there, she will fly to Perth in Western Australia and, by the time you read this, she should be well into her 4,803-mile journey to Brisbane. Then, towards the end of July, it’s a simple case of crossing the Tasman Sea and riding the full length of both New Zealand islands in winter, before flying to Anchorage in Alaska – Wilcox’s hometown – and down through Canada to Los Angeles, where she’ll hit Route 66 and, eventually, Chicago once again. That’s the plan, anyway.

“At this point, I’m not even a quarter of the way!” Wilcox laughs, with only a hint of existential dread. “Oh my God, it’s just so insane. It’s so long… But I feel good!”

The first person to cycle around the world was Englishman Thomas Stevens, who rode his penny farthing across North America, Europe and Asia between 1884 and 1886. His indirect route covered only 13,500 miles, so wouldn’t pass muster at Guinness HQ, but was impressive nonetheless.

The first woman to tackle the challenge did so to settle a bet. The story goes that a decade after Stevens’s great adventure, two Bostonian men wagered that a woman couldn’t possibly repeat the journey. Quite how Latvian-American Annie Cohen Kopchovsky came to test the ridiculous theory is unclear, but the mother of three set off from Boston in the summer of 1894, having only learned to ride a few days before. To fund her epic, unsupported journey, Kopchovsky took advantage of corporate sponsorship, adopting the nom-de-velo of Annie Londonderry in honour of the Londonderry Lithia spring water company, for whom she carried a small placard strapped to the handlebars. She returned to Boston, triumphant, 15 months later.

Initially, the bicycle was something of an emblem of female emancipation. It was a respectable, independent, chaperone-less mode of transport that broadened lives and led to the emergence of the first female endurance athletes (and to women’s trousers, courtesy of American social activist and fashion pioneer Amelia Jenks Bloomer). In 1935, Streatham cycle shop owner Evelyn Hamilton rode from John o’ Groats to Land’s End in just over four days, and a few years later, rode 10,000 miles in just 92 days, perhaps just to show she could.

Today, in line with the boom in marathon and triathlon culture, long-distance cycling and bikepacking are flourishing. Last year, Trainline published a survey showing that 21% of Brits were more likely to book a cycling holiday in 2023 than the year before, and 18% of them were inspired to do so by the Tour de France. Usage of EuroVelo routes – a 56,000-mile network of 17 long-distance cycling routes crisscrossing Europe – is up by almost 10% since 2019, and the global cycle tourism market was recently estimated to be worth around $128bn. “Bikepacking has significantly increased in the last 10 years,” says Joe Cruz, contributing editor at Bikepacking.com. Cruz also notes that the advent of mountain biking, and the tech advances that came with it, has helped imbue the sport with a sense of adventure.

Lael Wilcox’s own journey to long-distance cycling started slowly. “I kind of fell into the sport,” she says, a soft whoosh of air buffeting the line as she descends a hill. “I rode to my sister’s house one day, which was 80km away, because I didn’t have money for the bus.”Using a single-speed, fixed-gear bike, She only had a stack of handwritten, turn-by-turn directions to follow. When she made it, something clicked. “I was like, ‘If I can bike to her house, I could bike across the country.’” That was 2007.

Soon, Wilcox was splitting her time between working in bike shops and restaurants, and travelling the world on two wheels. She lived for years like this, spending up to 10 months a year riding her bike, before entering her first proper race in 2014, Alaska’s Fireweed (a 400-mile road race). She came second overall.

The following year, Wilcox set a new women’s record of 17 days, one hour and 51 minutes on the Tour Divide, a 2,673 mile off-road race from Canada to the Mexican border. But she began to experience breathing problems. “I rode myself to the hospital, five or six days into the race, to get treatment,” she says. “Then I got better, won the women’s race and broke the record.” The same thing would happen from time to time, forcing her to quit a few races over the years until she finally got a diagnosis this year and found that she had asthma. “Now, I can finally breathe!” she laughs, her pedals still whirring metronomically in the background.

In 2016, Wilcox tackled the pivotal race of her career, the Trans Am, a 4,400-mile unsupported time-trial across North America, from Oregon to Virginia. Riders must balance rest, refuelling and activity to perfection, and can’t accept any assistance. Wilcox was, on reflection, overconfident. “I was, like, ‘I’m going to win this race and I’m going to break the record!’” But she was more used to undulating, off-road tracks and she found the long, flat stretches of road brutal, especially in a heatwave (her heat-management strategy was to jump fully clothed into any body of water she happened to come across).

Despite everything – including a broken seat post that meant she had to cycle standing up on her pedals for 50 miles – she was in second place by the halfway point and trying to reel in the leader, the German rider Steffen Streich. The duel continued for a week or so until night 17 when, at around 3am in Virginia, on a road outside Bumpass (a real place, not a euphemism), she saw the flickering light of another cyclist coming towards her. It transpired Streich, severely sleep deprived, had woken from a power nap, got on his bike and started cycling the wrong way. The two met on the darkened road. “We had 250km to go until the finish,” she remembers. “I asked what his name was and realised, ‘Oh my God, this is the guy I’ve been chasing!’” Wilcox grasped the nettle and broke away from him. “We were so far out, but I knew this was my chance to crack this guy. You feel like you’re on death’s doorstep and then all this adrenaline kicks in and you’re riding 40km an hour.”

She held the pace to the finish line, winning the event overall – the first American to do it – and setting a new women’s record of 18 days and 10 minutes (Streich rolled in a couple of hours later). After crossing a whole continent, the end was a little anticlimactic: there was no crowd of people, no confetti cannon, just the offer of a camping chair and the news that her hotel was a three-mile ride away.

Wilcox hoped winning the Trans Am would be a watershed moment in her career, but she didn’t receive any meaningful financial support as a professional cyclist for another two years. “I didn’t really know if it would pan out,” she says, “or if anybody actually cared.” But she persevered and kept winning races, kept breaking records, until people started to take notice.

“Lael is one of the absolute luminaries of the sport, and in the smallest handful of most admired riders in endurance cycling,” says Cruz. “As a fierce competitor, she can remind us of Michael Jordan or Serena Williams, but she’s so relatable and accessible as a human being.”

I ask Wilcox what she thinks it is that sets her aside from others – what makes her capable of cycling up to 200 miles a day, every day for almost four months. “My dreams and my goals were always about going further and longer,” she says, adding that in addition to extreme physical fitness, you have to be open to things going wrong. “This is an incredible overuse situation,” she says, “I’m taxing every part of my physical body. But beyond that, it’s your willingness to figure it out. The resilience when something goes sideways.”

So far, nothing has gone too “sideways” on her trip around the world, but there’s still time. (If all goes to plan, Wilcox will roll into Chicago on Friday 13 September, which is ominous in itself.) Looking back at the miles she’s already covered, and how they are dwarfed by what is yet to come, I ask if she ever feels like giving up. Is a hill ever that bit too steep; a headwind that bit too mean? “For the most part, it’s hard,” she says with a polite dismissal. “But then I’m like, ‘What else would I rather be doing?’”

To follow Lael’s progress, go to laelwilcox.net