Hello and welcome to a new series from Escape Collective called Ultra, where we're going to be bringing

new stories that are big, stories from the worlds of bike packing, ultra racing, think people living

lives on the fringes of what you thought was possible to do by bike. Big rides and races in

far from places that's pretty much the gist of it. Our first ever

guest is Leo Wilcox who's looking to break the women's around the world

record. We spoke to her a few days ago and actually by the time you're watching

or listening to this,

she's set off from Chicago and is heading eastwards.

So without further ado, let's head over to Lael Wilcox? Yeah, my name is Lael Wilcox and I'm a bike packer professionally and that's just amazing.

Growing up I didn't really ride bikes and I always wanted to be a professional

athlete. I'm from Alaska and and somehow it worked out. Really I started by commuting and then traveling long distance and then entering my first bike packing race with no idea of what I could do or how it was going to turn out and immediately found out it was something that I was both really good at and something that I love to do.

So that's what I've been doing for the past nine years.

And it's just gotten better and better.

And this summer I'm kind of going after my biggest ride ever going after the around the world record.

So I'm very scared. I start in nine days and I'm I'm maybe 90% excited 10% scared but it's such a huge

project that that means all kinds of things and then I'm really looking forward to it.

Well let's I was going to ask some other intreg questions but let's maybe get this

scary stuff out of the way by talking about about the around the world. But first of all you were I read that you

were in 2016 gonna do it and you were gonna you got you got a new passport which

you know those aren't cheap so you want to get as much mileage

out them as soon as possible so you're going to ride the Trans Am race or race to Trans Am race and then

just carry on was that right that was the? Yeah, that was really my dream, but I'm such a dreamer all the time. I have all these big ideas and not always the plan or the money or the capacity to do all of that.

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