In a small town in the Shire of Banana, a 38-year-old Alaska woman jumps on her bicycle in the chill of the early morning and is about to set off for a day’s ride through the central Queensland countryside when a stranger approaches.
The man, in his 60s, has driven hours and slept in his van for this moment.
“He brought me a pineapple,” the cyclist chuckles later, recounting the meeting.
“He said, ‘You probably haven’t had much fresh fruit since you’ve been riding’.”
The town is Theodore, the day is last Sunday, and the bloke with the pineapple is an everyday Australian bicycle enthusiast who introduces himself as a friend of Kate and Neil from Perth.
The Alaskan, however, is no ordinary bike rider. Lael Wilcox has not only ridden across Australia to be here, but across Europe and the US, too. Wilcox is now past the halfway mark in a round-the-world odyssey in which she aims to ride 29,000km through 22 countries in about 110 days and, in so doing, set a new official Guinness world record.
Wilcox tells the story of the pineapple gift in her daily podcast about her trip, Banana, listened to by hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. Speaking to Guardian Australia on the phone on Tuesday while waiting for a transfer flight on the next leg of her trip through New Zealand, she admits it was the gesture, not the spiky fruit, that was “really sweet”.
“Oh my gosh, no, I didn’t end up eating it,” the ultra-distance rider says. “I didn’t really have a knife big enough to cut it.
“I regret that for sure. I bet it was good.”
The man with the pineapple also had his bike with him and rode with Wilcox along a short leg of her 28-day journey from Perth to Brisbane. Wilcox says it was often in the most remote places that people were waiting to join her at first light.
It also happened outside Lancefield, Victoria, where another rider had been cycling backwards and forwards for hours down the same stretch of road to stay warm.
“It was below freezing,” Wilcox laughs. “These guys are like: ‘Oh, you really slept in’, cause they’d get up at 4am to come find me.”
Those kinds of conditions came as something of a surprise to Wilcox, who says she had some “pretty tough weather” – “especially in Victoria, it was pretty rainy and windy and cold”.
“I think the biggest challenge for me in Australia was the wind,” she says. “Sometimes, it would be a super strong headwind, and I wasn’t really thinking about that coming in.”
Then there were the short winter days. Because she was riding for up to 14 hours a day, she was often pedalling in darkness.
In moments like these, the enormity of her mission dawned on Wilcox – she describes the sensation as like “eating an elephant with a plastic fork and knife”.
It could be the little things that kept her going, like the fact she was riding all day through nothingness to a place with a giant mural on a wheat silo, or a “big thing” – an oversized lobster, strawberry or tomato – or even just a funny placename.
“I love the town names; they are so good,” she says.
“I like the ones [with] double names, like Ban Ban Springs or Kin Kin or Grong Grong, Wagga Wagga. I also like the names that are just like a thing. Like Banana and Wombat.”
Wombats were also her favourite wildlife encounter, trumping emus, parrots, kangaroos and wild pigs, although Wilcox can’t remember exactly where she saw them.
“It’s all become kind of a blur,” she says. “We were there for a month, but it feels like a year just because every day is such a marathon. And I feel like there is before the Nullabor and after the Nullabor.”
She saw the wombats before that 200,000 sq km stretch of arid outback, maybe near the West Australian town of Denmark. And the stocky little marsupials also formed one of many road hazards.
“Everybody had a story – their friend who got hit by a kangaroo mountain biking,” Wilcox says. “Or this young girl I rode with who rode over a wombat.”
Wilcox got pretty close to an echidna and pedalled warily past kangaroos “the size of big basketball players”, but never came to grief.
That included with drivers. Although she was unnerved by the big “road trains”, most truck drivers gave her space and sometimes waved to her.
The same couldn’t be said for all car drivers. Coming into Brisbane late Monday night after a massive 300km day, Wilcox saw a young mother with her tiny son, who had drawn her a picture while waiting for her in the dark.
“So, I pull over to say ‘Hello’ and a driver yells out the window: ‘Get off road!’” Wilcox says.
While she laughs this story off, the cyclist knows the lethal danger drivers pose.
She is acutely aware of the fate that befell another legend of ultra-distance cycling, fellow Trans Am Bike Race champion Mike Hall.
The British rider died at age 35 when a vehicle struck him from behind outside Canberra in 2017.
“Mike getting killed on the road stopped me from road racing for, I think, six [or] seven years,” she says. “I just said it’s just not worth the risk. This is supposed to be for fun.”
Wilcox went back to dirt roads and mountain bike racing, and it wasn’t until last year that she felt comfortable returning to long stints on roads, with an increased emphasis on making herself visible. And the journey so far has not only rewarded her with joy and a sense of privilege but with awe and perspective.
“Sometimes, especially in Australia, which is just so vast, I just feel like this tiny little ant crawling on a map.”
