Assuming everything goes according to plan as she covers the last few hundred miles in the American Midwest, Lael Wilcox is on her way to setting a new women’s world record for circumnavigating the globe on a bicycle. As of Monday, the 38-year-old from Anchorage, Alaska, is less than a thousand miles away from her finish line in Chicago, Illinois.
She expects to arrive on September 12 in the same city where she started back on May 26.
In keeping with the accepted Guinness standard for attempting to go “around the world” via bike, she will have ridden nearly 29,000 km (18,000 miles) and passed through two antipodal points on the globe: specifically in Wilcox’s case Madrid, Spain, and Wellington, New Zealand. The journey has taken her across North America and Europe, into western Asia, and then across Australia and New Zealand before a final leg from Alaska to Chicago. All told, Wilcox has passed through 22 countries.
Already the owner of the women’s Fastest Known Time (FKT) on the Tour Divide Route and the holder of the overall record time for the Baja Divide, Wilcox is aiming (and well on track) to complete her circumnavigation journey in 110 days. That would be 14 days fewer than current women’s record holder Jenny Graham, who set that mark in 2018.
Wilcox’s pursuit of the record has driven her to ride an average of about 262 kilometers (163 miles) a day at an average speed of over 23 kph (14.5 mph) aboard a Specialized Roubaix and carrying necessities that have allowed her to spend three weeks’ worth of nights camping, while relying on hotels and friends for the rest of her stops.
She estimates that she has been fueled by between 6,000 and 8,000 calories a day and quite a bit of soda too, to the tune of “somewhere between 300-600 cokes” according to her approximation. All of that fueling and hard work is set to culminate in a world record on Thursday evening, when she is planning to arrive at Buckingham Fountain in Chicago’s Grant Park.
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