YOUR WHOLE LIFE
LAEL WILCOX IS THE WORLD’S BEST ULTRAENDURANCE RACER. HER LIFE IS ONE AUDACIOUS RIDE AFTER ANOTHER. BUT WHY DOES SHE DO IT? HERE ARE 14 CLUES.
IN 2016, LAEL WILCOX WON THE 6 700KM TRANS AM RACE OUTRIGHT, BEATING BOTH MEN AND WOMEN. THAT CEMENTED HER STATUS AS THE BEST CYCLIST IN THE WORLD AT RIDING INCREDIBLY LONG DISTANCES. BUT WHAT MAKES A SEEMINGLY MELLOW PERSON PUSH TO THE EDGE OF EXHAUSTION FOR THOUSANDS OF KAYS, BATTLING OTHER RIDERS TO SEE WHO CAN SLEEP LESS AND RIDE MORE? LAEL IS A TRAVELLER, A MENTOR, AND A CONTRARIAN – BUT SHE DIDN’T PLAN TO BE A RACER. SO WHY DOES SHE DO IT? WE SPENT A FEW DAYS WITH HER, TRYING TO UNDERSTAND WHAT MAKES HER TICK.
1 Ask the seventh-grade girls at Steller Secondary School in Anchorage, Alaska, to describe 32-year-old Alaskan Lael Wilcox, and they’ll tell you that she smells like spruce trees. “She’s almost like a tired person, but not grouchy. But then she gets on a bike and her energy goes up 100 times,” they say. “She’s a very, very beautiful person but also, like, fast and rough and stuff. She doesn’t tie her shoes. She looks like that one loner kid in 8th grade. One time we were all getting sticks to practice riding over and she picked up a really big log, like this big, and we still call it Lael’s Log. She likes food.” Do they know she’s a famous cyclist? “We’ve heard the stories. We’ve seen her bike really fast. Once she had to catch up with some kids from the Middle School and she just went zooooooooooom. And she disappeared.” 2 Lael’s life is one of movement. The Alaskan native didn’t start endurance racing until 2015, but within two years she’d won both the 6 700km Trans Am race and the 4 300km Tour Divide. In 2016 she co-designed – and later set the first fastest known time on – the Baja Divide, a 2 700km route through Baja California. In 2017, she co-founded a programme called GRIT (Girls Riding Into Tomorrow), a six-week course to teach middle-schoolers about biking. I joined Lael and the GRIT girls on their culminating journey, a three-day bikepacking trip to the base of the Eklutna Glacier. I wanted to see Lael in her element, but mainly to answer a bigger question: Why does she do it? Why would anyone – given talent, and opportunity, and the chance to be warm and dry and comfortable and financially secure – choose to do what she does? 3 Watch Lael ride uphill, leading with her shoulders, orange-andblue raincoat crackling over the fluid body underneath. It’s not effortless; nothing about her is effortless. She mashes the pedals, twisting her torso to build momentum. Her whole body seems to rock back and forth, as steadily as a wind-up toy. With each push, microexpressions – suggestions of a laugh or grimace – flit across her face. She sways, squints, sucks in air, and presses her lips thin to exhale. Muscle after muscle, breath after breath. Inevitable. Blinking against the wind. She lifts her gaze, and her body follows. Lael didn’t set out to 4 be a racer. For more than eight years, she travelled with her boyfriend Nicholas Carman, whom she met while studying French literature at the University of Puget Sound. Nick gave her a fixie so she could ride the 6km to work. One day, when she couldn’t afford the bus fare to visit her sister in Seattle, she rode there – 70km – instead. Once Lael had finished, she was certain she could ride anywhere. So she did: she and Nick rode down the East Coast, and travelled the world on bikes, crossing Africa, the Middle East, and North America. They lived like that, riding until money ran out, working until they could afford to leave again. They were happy.
The couple was riding across Israel in 2015 when Lael entered the Holyland Bikepacking Challenge, a 1 400km mountain bike race, on a whim. On the first day she was 40km ahead of the competition. She didn’t win, but the feeling of being on top was addictive. Two months later, she won the Tour Divide. Nick hated racing; he loved biking for the adventure, the cultural immersion; he thought that to ride so quickly was to miss out on the greatest gifts of travel. “It was a struggle to race with him,” Lael recalled. In 2017, she broke up with Nick after 10 years together. “Now I can do what I want to do.”
// When you’re Lael Wilcox, every minute represents either progress or a missed opportunity. The thought of wasting time agitates her. As the GRIT group rolls out, she is endlessly patient while they pedal, but grows restless when they stop for snack breaks. She does push-ups, and flutters between groups.
“Lael’s never broken a sweat in her life,” one of the girls tells me sincerely.
“I was joking!” calls Lael, laughing. It’s easy to see how the girls believe it. It takes Lael far more effort to stand still than to move. That night, while the adult chaperones gather to play cards, Lael checks on each of the girls. She shows them how to inflate sleeping pads and cheers when they catch frogs in the mud. Sometimes she disappears for a while into the woods. But I never see her rest.
6 Lael eschews the complexities that make most of our lives 6 – on the surface, at least – easier. She’s never owned a car, and has driven fewer than 10 times in her life. Driving just doesn’t interest her. In her adult life, she’s usually been broke, or half-broke, and uninsured. She carries less than what most would consider the bare minimum. As a final touch, packing for the GRIT trip, she tosses a single metal spoon into her empty frame pack, then frowns at the spoon: “I know. It’s huge.” On second thought, she removes the pack entirely.
7 // Lael in person is not Lael online. She’s more reserved than the happy, quick-responding Lael of social media, and is still surprised by how familiarly – and generously – strangers act when they meet her. In spring 2017, when she fractured two ribs on a ride, a chiropractor treated her for free. Money had been her limiting factor, but now, with sponsorships from Specialized and bikepacking gear company Revelate Designs, she’s more financially stable than ever in her adult life. She even called Specialized and asked them to donate bikes to the GRIT girls, and just like that, they did. In May of 2017, when five of the programme’s bikes were stolen, the Anchorage Daily News published an article about the crime. “So many people called me to help. There’d be an old woman with a mountain bike from 1980 that she wanted to give us.” Within a day, people had donated enough money to buy new bikes and expand GRIT for the next year, even allowing Lael and her co-founder to pay themselves a stipend. 8 When she’s not travelling, Lael sells bikes at the Bicycle Shop in Anchorage. It’s the oldest bike shop in Alaska, built in 1964, and still caters to families and kids, in addition to adventure cyclists. “She’s super-good at selling bikes,” her co-worker Christina Grande says. “Sometimes people ask, ‘Do you ride?’ And she’s like, ‘Yeah.’ You’d never even know that you’re talking with someone amazing. And she keeps busy. You never have to remind her. She always has to move around, re-stocking or doing the dishes.” In quiet moments, Lael does planks in the shoe section. When the shop closes at 7, she joins the other employees for beer. And she always finds time to ride. “Working in a bike shop in Alaska and being motivated to ride before or after work, that’s a long day,” says Christina. “The long [summer] days just make it even longer. It’s funny because I always have to go to bed early, but Lael takes advantage of every minute. That’s the style of endurance riding. You keep going.” 9 Lael’s quick to laugh, amused by moments that most of us wouldn’t notice. Over the course of three days, on the GRIT campout, here are things that make Lael chuckle: when pancakes don’t stick to a non-stick pan. When a frog leaps into muddy water. Mountain goats, perched on a cliff far above her. Fitting me for a bicycle in her parents’ garage: “This is so fun!” she exclaims as she adjusts the saddle. Songs from tinny speakers. An interesting stick. When porridge falls off her spoon. 10 The first and only time Lael agrees to a formal, one-on-one interview with me, we sit side by side on GRIT’s borrowed school bus, gliding down the highway. “So,” I start, flipping through my notes, “you grew up in Anchorage…” It’s not a question, but she interrupts me. “They say that about me in every interview,” she says. “I don’t think you even researched me.” I have wasted one of Lael’s minutes.
Lael finds herself in the 11 contradictory position of both being drawn to and resenting neediness in others. She is, she tells me, always taking care of other people. It’s like a compulsion. “If the person’s there, you’re gonna help them – or I am.” When I ask how she does that, she’s vague, though I’ve glimpsed enough to have a sense: one moment she’s riding her nephew to kindergarten for bike-to-work day, or getting me outfitted on her father’s bike so I can join the trip, and the next she’s making sure 18 tween girls are fed and safe on the greatest physical challenge of their lives. Why does she feel such a need to care for others? She doesn’t seem to understand the question.
“If people can’t take care of themselves…” she trails off. “They will if they’re alone. They’ll have to.”
12 // “[Racing] is not that different from the rest of life,” Lael tells me, “except I’m only taking care of myself.” She climbs onto her bike at the start – “it feels like a sigh” – and spends weeks living by her body’s rhythms and the distilled rush of forward momentum. She naps in ditches wearing all her clothes, mainlining chocolate milk and whatever she finds in petrol stations. She eats on her bike. She barely sleeps. The tragedy of wasted time and the social duties to others’ needs disappear completely. Every minute represents progress. Nothing else exists.
Racing is a world where everything is simple, and she gets to be superhuman again. 13 It’s hard to pinpoint what, exactly, Lael gets from racing. When I suggest that riding has taught her to handle suffering, she is quick to correct me. Sure, she’s exhausted and everything hurts. But suffering is discomfort you can’t control – and on her bike, she is always in control. Besides, discomfort doesn’t really bother her. If it did, she’d stop. If she stopped winning, she’d stop, too. She crosses finish lines after weeks alone, maybe busts through a toilet-paper streamer. Nothing happens when she wins, really. She’s tired, and there’s no prize money. She gets back on her bike and rides it a hundred or a thousand kays home.
It’s hard and expensive and anticlimactic. She doesn’t know why other people race when they’re not as fast as she is.
14 The race season will bring more exhausting kays, more lonely finish lines, more impossibly fast wins. But until then, Lael bikes up and down to Eklutna Glacier, an 800m climb that serves as the culminative physical challenge of the GRIT trip. She encourages the girls at the bottom, zooms upward, cheers for the girls at the top, zooms back down again. Back and forth. She won’t stop until they’ve all made it. And then they’re going to eat ice cream from a roadside stand, and chase rabbits around the grass. And then they’re going to ride along Eklutna Lake to the Serenity Falls Hut, and shout at mountain goats perched on the cliffs above them, and chop fallen logs with an old splitting axe propped behind the door, and eat pre-cooked penne out of plastic bowls. And then she’s going to filter water, and maybe slip out for a jog to the receding glacier. And then she’ll wash dishes in the river. And then, for a little while, she’ll sleep.