Celebrated endurance bicyclist Lael Wilcox finished a 108-day journey around the world at Chicago’s Buckingham Fountain Wednesday evening, completing a trip of more than 18,000 miles in a bid to break the Guiness World Record for fastest circumnavigation of the world on a bike by a woman.
Minutes after she got off her bike, Wilcox, 38, was beaming with her helmet still on her head.
“I’m feeling so good,” she said. “I felt like I could just keep riding forever.”
She laughed as she remembered kicking off from the same spot by the fountain for the beginning of her journey.
“I was just so fired up to go, and I was riding straight into a headwind,” she said.
Wilcox rode roughly 160 miles a day with a heart rate monitor, a witness book and a power meter to document her as-yet unsubmitted bid to break the current record of 124 days. Her wife, 31-year-old photographer Rue Kaladyte, has traveled with her and produced a podcast, Lael Rides Around the World, and kept followers up to date via Instagram. She is also working on a documentary about the bid, she told the Tribune Tuesday.
The trip has included 22 countries, two points directly opposite one another on the globe (in Wellington, New Zealand and Madrid, Spain), a bout of probable food poisoning, at least 300 Cokes and about 3,000 people who have biked alongside her, Wilcox guessed.
Though she’s mostly stayed in hotels, Wilcox and Kaladyte camped out some of the nights and stayed with friends and family for others. Guinness World Records allows for “supported” rides, Kaladyte said, meaning that when Wilcox crossed Alaska, where she was raised, she could sleep at her parents’ house.
Wilcox wasn’t allowed to draft, or let other cyclists reduce wind resistance, during her world-record attempt. But the bikers who came out to accompany her were allowed to draft off of her.
Kaladyte said Tuesday that watching people come out to travel with Wilcox for a stretch of the journey had been one of the most unexpected and moving parts of the project.
“You’re kind of in the middle of nowhere, and then (see) somebody is riding the opposite direction, and then you see them start to turn around,” she said. “Some guy in Australia drove for 10 hours to ride a couple hours with Lael.”
Blair Sundhausen, 29, came out with her own blue bike to catch Wilcox’s final approach. She’d been following the podcast and social media updates and planned to meet Wilcox and other riders a few miles south of downtown to ride in with them.
“It’s like being a part of history,” she said.
Across the plaza from Sundhausen, Wilcox’s parents, Paul and Dawn Wilcox, waited for her arrival on a bench. They flew in Tuesday, lugging their own bicycles and gear on what Paul deemed “the great Chicago public transportation” to meet their daughter.
“Never in our wildest dreams did we think we’d have a daughter who would ride around the world on a bike,” Dawn said.
They were calm as more and more people joined a waiting crowd with bikes and homemade signs. One read “What would Lael do?” Another read “Welcome back to Chicago.”
A few minutes later, Wilcox sped up the lakefront path, crossed Lake Shore Drive and dismounted to cheers.
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