Meeting and Chasing an International Hero
I haven’t yet become familiar with a successful competitive athlete with a story like mine. I’m sure they are out there. I hope they are. My whole “why” in endurance sport is to serve as an example of what can be done anyway, when the social support (namely, family and more than a few friends) that is so frequently a factor, the proverbial village of helping hands that it takes to reach a high level, is absent. The worry that maybe it can’t is the noisy, nocturnal rodent in the ceiling that I can’t seem to run off.
In April of 2024, I sent a handful of emails to prominent female cyclists with questions about how they found sponsors, teams, struck the balance between responsibility and the pursuit of more, and I got exactly one reply. It was from Lael Wilcox, ultra-endurance rider, Trans-Am winner, and now Around-the-World record breaker.
I had been following Lael passively for a while. Having grown up without any real role models, always fervently inspired and guided by something internal instead, I never identified any idols in my adult life either until recently. Something in my shift from interest in single-day podiums to point-to-point, multi-day events got me paying more attention to the voice and storytelling of those types of figures. From my very brief experience with bikepackers, people that embark on self-guided, self-supported, self-motivated, solo-survivalist passages are on a different wavelength than those that chase extreme output for a few hours to a day and then retire to climate control and hot showers at the end of the night. For myself, high-octane racing was the pure essence of sport in all of it’s golden and shadowed corners; bikepacking was temporarily stepping into an entirely different life.
Although Lael’s epic accomplishments were unfathomable to me and dwarfed my solo expeditions that only lasted a few days and a handful of states, reading about her beginnings felt a little more relatable than I was used to. Stories of working in restaurants to save money for races and riding to them, riding to the start of already stupid-hard events was familiar. And having felt the frenzy of covering ground daily, the silent thruster that seemed to draw more power the deeper into the fatigue and the muscle soreness I got, being fast over days, weeks, somehow seemed less daunting than being fast for 100-miles.
It inexplicably looked more possible.
And so, when Lael set off from Chicago to break the women’s world record, with the campaign of it also becoming a global community ride for anyone to join her at any time, I started smacking the ceiling repeatedly with a broom every time that animal started scrambling, knowing it wouldn’t rid me of it but at least to get it to shut up every few hours. I kept eyes on her 170-mile-per-day average on Strava for the next three months.
In the meantime, I continued having the most unpredictable year since I had moved away from my home city. Through hardship I had always trudged through by having some sort of beefcake ride or race plan on the horizon, and had historically been able to scrape just enough resources together to make them happen. But this was the year of rug-pulling, and every single plan I had for the summer fell apart like a sculpture of toothpicks. I did take one big leap-of-faith and moved back into a house with my new boyfriend and began the decompression ritual that comes with letting go of a life on-the-fly, and before I could dare to pencil much in on the calendar again, Lael was back stateside, cruising the coast of California toward the start of historic Route 66- her beeline to the finish of her record attempt back in Chicago.
I now lived further from her track through Missouri than I had when she announced her plan, and I started pulling wires. My new boyfriend, Jeremy, was familiar with my wildness on a bike anecdotally, but hadn’t seen the intensity in use yet. I told him that Lael was on the way, and that I wanted to meet her, and that I wanted to do it in ultra-inspired fashion- a 450+mile round-trip bike ride from home to a strategically-planned intercept point, ride 75 miles with her to just west of St. Louis (if I could keep pace on a loaded bike), and be home in five days. I needed a lot to line up just right. I needed to predict her timeline that was not publicly posted, I needed the job that I had just started and had tried to ghost me to pay me so I could afford a couple cheap hotels, I needed the weather to stay temperate, and I needed my engine to run right for back-to-back days of hard riding I hadn’t been training for.
And it all did. Flawlessly.
I was ready by a Saturday to roll out on a Monday. Saturday night my overthinking habit served me in an unusually positive way- I realized my tracking math was wrong and I needed to leave a day earlier. After shit, anticipatory sleep, I began rolling south on Sunday morning, bound for the bunkhouse just east of Jefferson City, MO on the famous Katy Trail.
The day was easy despite relearning to handle a bike with weight on the handlebars. 40 miles of rolling, buttery pavement dropped me at my first luxury gas station stop of the trip, and from there it was all flat, crushed limestone for 50 more to the spur into the dead-on-Sunday state capital. I hit the Subway downtown for an actual meal ten-minutes before they closed, and headed back to the trail for the last 13 miles to the bunkhouse.
For just $10 a night, the Turner Katy Trail Shelter provides two floors of beds, a shower room, basic kitchen, and secure bike storage. The only drawback is that you have to pack in your own bedding. I had crushed a fitted twin sheet into my bar bag and precariously buckled a travel pillow onto my saddle, but with the night dipping down into the mid-40’s that night, I was kept awake for all but a few hours by shivers and a hyper-awareness of wandering brown recluses.
Monday. This was the day I made the unknown haul to Rolla from Jefferson City (85 miles), through territory with no activity on cycling heatmaps. For expediency I knew I had to risk state routes as the backroads would all be unpaved, steep, and slow. It turned out to be the most beautiful stage of the trip as I entered the Ozarks and was met by rolling golden grass and rock walls, dipped in and out of river-valley towns, but the climbing only became steeper and denser as I neared Rolla. Over the crest of the last major climb, a cyclist who introduced himself as Matt ran me down and greeted me with “don’t usually see roadies out this way, they’re scared of the hills.”
Yeah buddy. I told him about the mission I was on and he led me on a safer route to my hotel. We exchanged Strava handles and I carried on up the road.
I checked into my hotel and immediately checked Lael’s location via the satellite tracker she had been carrying for her entire trip. She’d crossed the Oklahoma border into Missouri the night before, and stayed overnight just east of Joplin, roughly 170 miles away. She was now only about 60 miles from me. I had chosen Rolla as my meet point for two reasons- it was the closest town on her path that I could get to fairly directly, and it was my guess that she’d end her day’s ride in or near there based on her daily average. Her route across the world was visible from the start, but her stopping points were unknown without talking to Lael yourself. By this point, it was still early enough in the afternoon that I started to predict that she might just blow right through town in the dark. I needed to take care of my needs after 188 miles of heavy riding, so I cleaned up, grabbed some Steak-‘n-Shake from next door, and recapped with loved ones on the phone, refreshing the tracker anxiously every 20 minutes. I unloaded my gear from my bike and laid out a fresh skinsuit, and boiled with anticipation as I prepared to jump out onto the road and meet Lael Wilcox in the dark.
At 9:04 p.m., September 9th, Lael crested the hill in front of my hotel as I stood over my bike with lights flashing. An escort vehicle following with its hazards on was a surprise to me, but as a hyper-vigilant person, it let me fully engage with Lael in conversation and not sweat passing cars. I asked her if the driver was Rue, her partner and photojournalist that had been documenting her ride.
“No, it’s some locals that wanted to escort me to St. James because the roads are bad.”
I hardly expected the worst roads she had ridden in the world, based on safety or surface, would have been in Missouri, USA. She insisted they had been great. Through the small-talk I heard the urgency in her responses. I had assumed that by this point in her effort, having only days to go in her globetrotting ride, Lael would be quite casual; instead, I recognized a similar intensity that I spend much of my life in. She was present, but she was on. I learned she was now trying to reach Chicago by day 108- two days earlier than her goal time. As we cut the darkness, I told her the bullet points of my life on a bike, that I lived in a van for five years to keep the dream alive, and that she was the only email that was returned.
“Really?” the sharpness broke with what sounded like genuine surprise. “I really try,” she said. We talked briefly about finding sponsors in the ultra-endurance world, and she asked me what kind of racing I did prior.
I said, “Criteriums, cyclocross, primarily gravel after that, but I don’t really jive well with most of that crowd.” She cracked a laugh.
She told me she got exactly 7 hours of sleep every night, and that it came easily. As one who sweats everything, is kept up late into the night and hawks my alarm on race mornings, I was envious of that off switch. I avoided as many of the questions that I would have expected her to hear on loop throughout her trip as I could, while riding at her shoulder at 20mph along the frontage road of I-44, but made it a point to ask the most pertinent one to me at the time- “Where are you stopping tonight?”
“Sullivan!” she declared through the wind.
40 miles further up the road. My stomach dropped, but I was hell-bent. I told her I had planned to ride a chunk of the next day with her and asked what time she guessed she might start again in the morning, and started running all of my internal clocks. 30 minutes after meeting one of the few people I have ever genuinely revered, I bid Lael goodbye and let her know that I hoped to catch her in Sullivan in the morning. She went right, I went left and turned around at the entrance of a gas station.
“Genna!” I hear from the window of the pickup that had been behind us for ten miles as it turned behind me. How the heck did this person know my name?
It was Matt, the chance cyclist that had found me earlier in the day. Intrigued and inspired by the story I had told him about Lael and that I was on a mission to ride in her wake, he had come out to insure an uneventful ride out of Rolla. Like a plot device come to life, he and his excited daughter gave me a fast lift back to my hotel so I could more quickly get to bed and prepare to go find Lael again first thing the next morning. Like a cheesy sitcom joke, sleep didn’t come easily.
I was on the bike and headed to Sullivan by 4:50 a.m. It was 49 degrees, completely dark, with some fog hanging in low spots on the road. I put the one t-shirt I had brought with me on over my skinsuit for minor protection from the crisp draft I was very underprepared for, with the spirit of “deal with it, bitch, we gotta go.” I kept the pace higher than usual for a loaded ride, caught between trying to keep the engine warm, and trying to cover the 40 miles fast enough to relax my sore legs for a moment before trying to keep up with a world-record-chaser. I got to town at 8:20. I took my goofy shirt off and refilled my bottles in a park bathroom across the street from Lael’s hotel, then decided a few minutes later to grab a quick breakfast from the gas station. I hawked the tracker watching for the moment it went live again so I didn’t miss her exit. I rolled over to the hotel entrance with a container of biscuits and gravy and sat on a bench. I opened the lid and took a bite, and then looked at the tracker again.
It was on, and showed her headed east away from the parking lot. My heart stopped and instantly shot through my throat. I threw my barely-touched breakfast in the trash can, grabbed my bike, and hauled out of there in full aero-tuck with a growling stomach. Crushing it through town, I took my phone out of my pocket and checked tracking again. I was gaining. A few minutes later, headed away from businesses and out toward the frontage road again, I noticed I was now ahead of her location and I slowed to stop. I rolled onto the edge of the road and pulled out a Little Debbie fruit pie from my handlebar bag, and ate it while I waited for Lael to appear over my shoulder again. The tracker showed her stopped at and intersection for a while, so I took a moment to breathe in some relief.
It was then that I figured out the tragic delay in the tracker that undid the story from here forward. Another update, and she was somehow ahead of me again. She had been the entire time, and all of my waiting put me what was ultimately ten minutes back. Still, I got back in the saddle and flat cooked the pace for nearly an hour, full-throttle over every roller, hunkering down in every straight, pulling my phone out every few minutes to see if it was doing any good. Eventually, I encountered road crews doing repair work. I asked a worker in passing if another cyclist had come by recently, and he said “yeah, about ten minutes ago.”
I kept the pedal to the floor into St. Clair, losing all confidence but still hoping the silhouette of another bike would appear over the crest of the next hill. Once I found traffic again, now at the end of my range for holding that speed with a packed bike, I turned off into a Casey’s parking lot, officially giving up the ghost. I grabbed a Red Bull from inside to trip the brain’s reward system and distract myself from my disappointment, my perceived screw-up. I sat down on the curb and stared at my phone. I gave myself a few minutes to pick myself apart, and then a large group of cyclists rolled up from the road. They began talking to me, asking me where I was headed and where I had come from, and I told them. Many of them hadn’t heard of Lael or her ambition at all, and after a few minutes, I became aware of how much more interested they were in who I was and what I had accomplished just to meet her than they were anything else. Someone chasing a world record had just surged through town not long before, but they just wanted to know about me.
I said goodbye to them and started the last 30 miles to my next hotel. I rolled into Eureka physically sound, but emotionally frayed. I sat down at a Mexican restaurant and ordered a jumbo margarita on the rocks, queso, and a chicken quesadilla I had to force myself to eat. As is the way of the ponderer, I let my guard come down and asked myself the internal questions about how I, a person that historically removes herself from the path of others and carries a nearly unbearable tension when approached by strangers, could only recognize the true intensity of what I myself was doing through the recognition from strangers. I had accomplished my mission to meet a legend, albeit briefly, but I hadn’t gotten to ask her the larger questions and learn more about her process to the top.
I was denied any more opportunity to draw comparisons.
I was gifted the freedom to continue to wonder. To not count myself out because what advantages someone else may or may not have had.
I punched the end of the broom through the ceiling and heard that obnoxious animal hiss, and saw golden daylight through the hole.
~
That evening on the phone, while soaking my sore legs in the tub, I told Jeremy that I was ready to be home. I laid out my plan to cover the distance of the last two days of my trip all at once. At 6:00 a.m. the next morning, I headed away for 189 miles home, on fatigued legs, at a large calorie deficit, and with an extra large band-aid on my rear tire to cover a gash that you could see the inner tube through.
I finished the ride just after sundown, faster than I had ever ridden that kind of distance, with a loaded-down bike. 462 miles inside four days, alone.
Haunted by something that just won’t let me stop pushing.
I will the machine. 