Wilcox is well on her way to setting a new record for cycling around the world. Shanti Mathias joins her on the road – and hopes she can keep up.
I feel like I’m about to interview a red carpet celebrity: a little nervous, a little wondering if I wore the right clothes, a little sweaty – although that might be the hill I just cycled up. “You can ride with her and talk to her if you like, I’ll let you have a turn,” someone says, ushering me to the front of the peloton. I take a deep breath, and start talking to Lael Wilcox, hoping she notices the bike shorts I’m wearing to dress for the occasion, and not the guiro-like sound my bike chain has been making since I adjusted the derailleur cable last week.
It’s not particularly easy to interview someone while you’re both biking along a busy road in South Auckland, but if you want to talk to the person trying to break the world record for cycling around the world, you have to simply hope you can keep up.
“I’m always amazed at who comes along to ride with me,” says Wilcox, humbly, of her entourage. I’ve taken the train out to South Auckland, and biked through Clover Park to come and meet her; others have ridden with her from Ngaruawahia this morning. This afternoon, the other riders are all men, although Amy, who designs bikepacking equipment, joins along the way.
Everyone is here to accompany the 38-year-old American wearing black biking pants, with a neon-yellow visibility vest swung over her top. It’s a sunny winter’s day, the 73rd afternoon of her attempt to break the record for a woman biking around the world. So far, Wilcox is smashing it, well on track to surpass the previous record by at least two weeks.
As we roll to a traffic light, I notice a fruit bun tucked in her handlebar bag, fuel for cycling. She smiles and nods as someone explains how narrow the Auckland isthmus is, that we can see the east coast from here on Redoubt Road, but we’re heading to Auckland Airport, on the west coast of the island.
Wilcox, who has an auburn ponytail and crinkles around her eyes that suggest she spends a lot of time outside and smiles frequently, seems calm, focused: she’s alert to the traffic on the road and the people around her, but as she pushes off at the traffic light, riding out of the saddle for a few hundred metres, she also seems to be thinking about something else.
She might be considering what’s next on her journey. The criteria to get the Guinness World record for cycling around the world are exact, and don’t require a perfect global circumnavigation or somehow acquiring the ability to cycle over the sea. To qualify, you have to bike at least 29,000km in one direction (east to west, or west to east), with transit time on planes or boats counted towards the total. You also have to pass through approximate antipodal points (Wilcox went through Madrid, which is exactly opposite Wellington) and begin and end at the same spot. The current record for women was set by Scot Jenny Graham, who managed to bike around the world in 124 days; Wilcox is aiming for 110.
To achieve this, she has to bike an average of 273km per day. For context, that’s the exact same distance as the men’s cycling road race at the Olympics – except instead of a one-off event, Wilcox has been riding that distance, every single day, for the last two and a half months. By comparison, the Tour de France is considered a test of endurance too, but it’s just 21 days for men and eight for women, covering smaller distances: it simply doesn’t compare to the pure grind of endurance biking.
Wilcox cycled the length of New Zealand in a week, travelling from Invercargill to Picton in just four days. This final leg, to Auckland, is a shorter day – only (only!) 130km. From here, she’s taking her bike apart to put it in a box and fly to Alaska, where she’s from. “I’m really looking forward to seeing my family, and having longer days,” she says, as we round the corner past Puhinui Station and start heading along the final five kilometres to the airport.
In Alaska’s far northern summer, she’ll have light from 5am to 10pm, in contrast to New Zealand, where she’s been starting and finishing each day in the dark. “Riding in the winter is hard, because you’re in the dark so much,” she says: those last, dreary black kilometres are often the hardest. After riding through Canada and down the West Coast of the US, Wilcox will finish her ride where she started in Chicago, hopefully by mid-September.
Wilcox is lean and graceful as she leans into corners with her bike, her body fully connected to the machine. If she wasn’t decked out in state-of-the-art bike clothing from her sponsor Rapha, she might be someone you pass in the line at the supermarket. But her determination to cycle hundreds of kilometres a day for months sets her apart from riders like me, just joining for a few.
Her determination is also obvious when she describes her schedule. “I get up every day, cycling for 14 hours, sleeping for seven,” she says. Day after day of this, road after road. I ask her if this feels simple. “It doesn’t feel simple, really, it feels more obsessive.” She’s loved the scenery in New Zealand – the big mountains, the paddocks full of sheep – and she’s already trying to figure out when she can come back here in the future. But really, she admits, a world record attempt is hardly a bike tour, and most of what she’s seen has simply been what is visible from the road.
That said, she’s still trying to make her trip fun. “I didn’t pick the most efficient route, because I wanted to go up hills,” she says. “It’s three and a half months, I had to have fun.” Of all the places she’s been through since she left Chicago in May, she says the Netherlands had by far the best setup for long distance biking, safe paths with less risk of getting taken out by a track. “But it’s so flat!” she exclaims. She liked the European mountains – on her first day in Portugal, she climbed 5,180 metres – and going through Georgia. She’s previously cycled through central Asia for the Silk Road Mountain Race through Kyrgyzstan, and also loved a route through the Balkans she completed in 2022. “I’m so, so lucky to get to do this,” she says – even if there are many hours on the bike when she lets her mind go, nearly detached from her body, and moments when she’s almost fallen asleep while still pedalling.
As we near the airport, I ask Wilcox if flights and ferries are relaxing, time when she knows she won’t have to be on a bike. “Not really, they’re the most complicated part, it’s where things can go wrong,” she says. Even though she’s been biking since early this morning, her pedalling is still even as she powers along the road, the Manukau harbour sparkling in the sunshine, the mangrove leaves glossy. I bike everywhere, and consider myself reasonably fit, but I can still feel a burn in my thighs and a catch in my breath as I try to keep up.
It helps, of course, that Wilcox has been an endurance athlete for over a decade. After riding 80km one day to visit her sister, she realised that if you just kept going, you could get really far on a bike. She set a new record of 17 days to complete the Tour Divide, a race from the Canadian to Mexican border, and won the Trans Am Race, which crosses the US from West to East Coast, in 2016. She’s slowly picked up sponsors, and runs mentorship programmes for women and girls who want to start doing long-distance cycling. Along with the raw desire to keep going, the money helps provide motivation. “This is also just my job,” she says.
Like many athletes, Wilcox has also had to become a content creator. Every day on her world record attempt, she produces a podcast, sponsored by a company that sells phone mounts for bikes. Often sounding sleepy – you can tell it’s recorded at night – she describes where she’s been and her encounters with people who ride with her. While the anecdotes are at times banal, Wilcox always has a soft-spoken amazement to her voice: that this is her job, that people are kind, that the world is beautiful.
Wilcox’s wife, Rugile Kaladyte, chimes in on the podcast too: she’s supporting the ride in a car, meeting up with Wilcox several times a day and helping with logistical details. A photographer, Kaladyte is also filming Wilcox. They hope to make a 90-minute feature documentary about the record attempt, which I have no doubt will be a smash hit at mountain film festivals. She posts regularly on Instagram, and has published her route online. Enabling other people to join, which isn’t possible in most traditional bikepacking races, was crucial to her feeling that she was actually interacting with people in the places she goes, instead of simply passing through as fast as possible.
This approach means she has dozens of fans wherever she goes. “She’s even cooler than I thought she’d be,” whispers Simon, a 58-year-old who’s accompanied her most of the day, as Wilcox fishes the fluoro vest over her head. He’s inspired: he wants to go on a 300+ kilometre bike ride now, just to know that he can do it. “I was already mad on bikes, but this is something else,” he says.
By now, we’re at Auckland Airport, the gloom of the covered drop-off area a stark contrast to the shiny day beyond. People lean their bikes against rubbish bins, or leave them on the ground. Wilcox takes her shoes off and changes into fresh socks. Her wife Rue is sitting on a bench with several loaded bags and her camera out, and podcast fans are saying hi to her too. Amy, a local bikepacking diehard who brought a bike box for Wilcox to pack her vehicle into, is handing out sodas, and several of the riding group are asking Wilcox for selfies, telling her how inspired they are.
While Wilcox is smiley and grateful to everyone, I see her face change when she hugs her wife, leaning into Rue’s shoulder: a smaller, deeper smile that stretches her eyes upwards. So that’s where all the lines in her face come from, this love that she carries across the continents.
As we were riding, I had it in the back of my mind. I’m going to have to bike back from the airport somehow, I’m already a bit tired. But seeing Wilcox at the airport, with so far still to go, I feel certain I can ride up the Hillsborough hill, turn all the corners, back to The Spinoff office. Her whole demeanor inspires action.
How will it feel to have the record? “I really don’t know,” Wilcox says. “I can’t think much beyond it.” She knows, though, that records are there to be broken: she wants to encourage more people to try biking, to try going a little further, to try going for one night, or a dozen. Eventually, some of those people are going to try biking around the world.
Her bike, after its journey through New Zealand, is flecked with bits of mud: it looks tired, but ready for more, just like Wilcox. Has she had to replace many parts? “You know, it’s funny – I’ve worn through my tires, but hardly any brake pads,” she says. That’s because, I suppose, she doesn’t stop.