Lael Wilcox: around the world in 108 days

On 11 September 2024, a 38-year-old American rides back past Buckingham Fountain in Chicago, having crossed four continents and twenty-two countries in the saddle. Lael Wilcox has just ridden around the world in 108 days, 12 hours and 12 minutes — sixteen days faster than the previous holder, and the quickest women's time ever ratified. The story of an epic ridden at nearly 270 kilometres a day, with no coach, no training plan, and a quiet stubbornness.

Chicago, 11 September 2024, late in the day

There is something distinctly anti-spectacular about the scene. No finish line painted on the road, no giant clock. Just a rider in bib shorts coming up Chicago's lakefront, rounding Buckingham Fountain one last time and putting a foot down, at 19:18. Around her, a knot of people on bikes, phones held up, her wife behind a camera. Lael Wilcox is smiling, a little dazed. She has just ridden for 108 days, 12 hours and 12 minutes — and rewritten a record that had stood for six years. Guinness World Records would ratify the performance on 20 September.

She had set off from the same spot fifteen weeks earlier, on 26 May at 7:06. In between: four continents, twenty-two countries, three transcontinental flights to link the rideable sections, and 18,125 miles covered under her own legs — that is 29,169 kilometres. The elevation counter, for its part, reads 192,024 metres of cumulative climbing: the equivalent of nearly twenty-two ascents of Everest from sea level.

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108 days, and what that figure means

The round-the-world cycling record follows a precise set of rules laid down by Guinness World Records. You have to cover at least 18,000 miles (about 28,970 km) by bike, ride broadly in a single direction, pass through two antipodal points — two places diametrically opposite on the globe — and complete a total travel distance (flights included) greater than the circumference of the equator, that is 40,075 km. Wilcox chose Madrid, in Spain, and Wellington, in New Zealand, as her antipodes. Flights to cross the oceans are allowed, but the clock never stops.

In 108 days, 12 hours and 12 minutes, Wilcox wiped out the 124 days, 10 hours and 50 minutes of Scotland's Jenny Graham, who had held the women's benchmark since 2018. Sixteen days gained. Her ride belongs to a steady acceleration of the women's record: Germany's Juliana Buhring opened the modern era in 2012 (152 days), Italy's Paola Gianotti brought it down to 144 days in 2014, Jenny Graham to a little over 124 days in 2018, and Lael Wilcox went under the 109-day mark in 2024. In twelve years, women have cut nearly a month and a half off the ride around the Earth.

One nuance has to be set down, in fairness. The men's record still belongs to Britain's Mark Beaumont, who completed his lap in 78 days, 14 hours and 40 minutes in 2017, with near-military logistics: three support vehicles, eight crew members, sixteen hours in the saddle a day. The two performances do not compare point for point. Above all, Graham's 2018 record had been set in complete self-sufficiency — she carried all her own equipment, with no follow vehicle and no booked accommodation. The current Guinness rules no longer distinguish supported attempts from self-supported ones. Wilcox therefore holds the outright women's best time; Graham keeps the particular aura of the solo feat. The two stories coexist without cancelling each other out — and Graham was among the first to salute Wilcox.

It is the most beautiful thing to see women pushing the limits of their sport in whatever way they see fit.

— Jenny Graham, on Lael Wilcox's record

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The Anchorage girl who was never meant to make it

Lael Wilcox was born on 18 July 1986 in Anchorage, Alaska. Nothing in her background pointed her towards elite sport. She came from running first, then graduated in 2008 from the University of Puget Sound — natural sciences and French literature. That same year, in her early twenties, she discovered the bike in the most direct way there is: with her partner at the time, she decided to go and see the world, saved up by stringing together odd jobs through the winter, then hit the road. For several years she lived without a car, without a fixed home, sometimes without a phone, and crossed some thirty countries that way. The bike is not a sport: it is a way of life, a way of looking.

The switch to racing came late, and at the top. In 2015 she set the women's record on the Tour Divide, the legendary time-trial crossing of the Rockies from Canada to Mexico. Then, in 2016, she flat-out won the Trans Am Bike Race — more than 4,200 miles coast to coast across the United States, from Astoria to Yorktown. Not the women's race: the race outright. She became the first American woman to win it, ahead of every man, in 18 days and 10 minutes. The story is well known among ultra fans: riding up through the night, she passed the leading man in the final days and never gave him a chance.

That is where one of Lael Wilcox's engines sits. Before she became a recognised athlete, she worked behind a bar. Customers, she says, kept telling her she was lying about her rides — that a woman could not ride like that. The anger became fuel.

Maybe they will read this and it will make them change their minds. Maybe they will not doubt the next woman who says she has done a ride like that.

— Lael Wilcox, CNN Sport, October 2024

1. 20081st trip around the worldby bike, touring
2. 2015Tour Divide record1st woman
3. 2016Trans Am victory1st, ahead of all the men
4. 2024World record ★108 d 12 h · ratified by GWR
5. 2026Outright record?attempt announced

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A route in four acts

The 2024 route reads like a score written to link the continental land masses by their longest rideable stretches. Act one: Chicago–New York, seven days to cross the Midwest and the Appalachians. Then a flight to Porto, and the big European section — a month to work up the Iberian peninsula, across France, the Netherlands, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, the Balkans and Turkey, as far as Tbilisi, in Georgia. Mountain days there sometimes top 5,000 metres of climbing.

Act three: a flight to Perth, and the crossing of Australia from west to east, including the endless Nullarbor Plain, a ruler-straight ribbon of tarmac where for days on end there is neither a tree nor a bend — and where the southern winter served up sub-zero nights and headwinds. Act four, New Zealand, from Invercargill to Auckland, over the passes of both islands. Then the final loop: back onto the American continent via Anchorage, her home town, and a run south through the Yukon, British Columbia and the Pacific coast, before turning east onto the legendary Route 66 to head back up to Chicago.

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Seven hours' sleep: the long-game strategy

What strikes you about Wilcox is the absence of all the apparatus we associate with performance sport. No coach. No periodised plan. No power meter scrutinised watt by watt. Her training method is a paradox of sorts: she strings races together, and uses the recovery between two events as her main preparation.

But it would be a mistake to picture a driven soul who never sleeps. On her shorter races — the Tour Divide or the Trans Am, two to three weeks — Wilcox practises sleep deprivation, three to five hours a night. For a round-the-world ride of more than a hundred days, that regime leads straight to exhaustion. So she made the opposite, strategic choice: to sleep an average of seven hours a night, most often in proper accommodation, to make the effort sustainable over fifteen weeks. It is that structured sleep that let her hold a high travelling speed — around 24 km/h — from the first day to the last.

The rest of her logistics is almost provocatively simple. She barely stops to eat: she buys enough to keep going, stuffs it all in her bags and swallows it while pedalling, for an estimated expenditure of more than 4,000 calories a day. Her nutrition advice fits on a Post-it: “Whatever you fancy, go for it. You need food, and lots of it.” Her bike says the same thing: a Specialized Roubaix with integrated fork suspension (Future Shock), an electronic SRAM RED AXS groupset, Zipp wheels on a SON dynamo hub that recharges GPS and lights on the move, and 35 mm Specialized Mondo tyres. Light, reliable, self-sufficient for power.

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A record ridden in company

Ultra-cycling is lived alone, but Wilcox's round-the-world ride was anything but a hermit's business. On many sections, local riders came out to ride a few hours or a few days alongside her. Some of those meetings were organised: for several years now, Wilcox has been running Women's Rallies, gatherings where 50 to 70 women join her to ride together over several days. The aim is plain — to show, by example and by weight of numbers, that those roads are theirs too.

The same intent runs through Anchorage GRIT (Girls Riding Into Tomorrow), the introductory cycling programme for teenage girls she co-founded in Alaska, at the end of which every participant leaves with a bike of her own.

In the background there is Rugile Kaladyte. A photojournalist by trade, she is also Lael Wilcox's wife. She followed the whole journey, camera in hand, and turned it into the film Lael Rides Around the World, a 90-minute documentary presented by SRAM, premiered at the Sea Otter Classic then taken on tour to Chicago, New York, London, Munich and Anchorage. During the record, Wilcox was also raising funds for the Adventure Cycling Association.

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What next?

Wilcox does not consider the matter closed. Barely home, she announced she was targeting the outright circumnavigation record — all categories combined — Mark Beaumont's 78 days, with a fully supported attempt announced for 2026. The change of philosophy would be radical: to go under the 78-day mark, she would have to swallow nearly 390 km a day, roughly sixteen hours in the saddle daily, on a much more direct lowland route, backed by a full team. The antithesis of her usual way of travelling — and exactly the kind of ceiling she likes to crack.

There is something deeply coherent in this trajectory. A hundred and thirty years earlier, another unknown, Annie Londonderry, became the first woman to ride around the world — fifteen months, a great deal of boat, and a consummate sense of showmanship. Between her and Lael Wilcox, the equipment has changed and the speeds have exploded, but the gesture remains the same: getting on a saddle to prove that no road is off limits. The machine has never stopped being an instrument of freedom. Wilcox simply pushed it, in 2024, all the way around the planet.

What happened next → Lael Wilcox pulls out, caught by the heatwave Having left Chicago to take on the outright record mentioned above, she gave up on 21 June 2026 after 4 948 km: the European heatwave got the better of her.

Sources and references

1. BIKEPACKING.com — Lael Wilcox Breaks Record for the Fastest Circumnavigation of the Globe by Bicycle! (11 Sept. 2024)
2. Lael Wilcox (official site) — 2024 Around the World (day-by-day logbook)
3. CNN Sport — American cyclist Lael Wilcox on her 18,000-mile world record (21 Oct. 2024)
4. Cycling Weekly — Lael Wilcox sets new women's Around the World record
5. road.cc — What does 'circumnavigating the globe by bike' actually entail?
6. Velo / Outside — Lael Wilcox Smashes Guinness World Record
7. Rouleur — 'The more you sleep, the better you perform'
8. BIKEPACKING.com / The Radavist — Lael Rides Around the World (Rugile Kaladyte documentary)
9. GearJunkie — 'The Ride of My Life': Lael Wilcox Sets Women's Around-the-World Cycling Record
10. Wikipedia — Lael Wilcox (biography, results)
11. Wikipedia — Around the world cycling record (Guinness rules, history)
12. Canadian Cycling Magazine — Lael Wilcox targets men's Around-The-World record
13. Red Bull — Mark Beaumont, 78 d 14 h 40 min (2017)

The Long Ride