The Sound of Freedom and Joy

Lael Wilcox knows all about that. The 2008 grad has probably felt that exhilaration in more places than any cyclist on earth, given that she recently set a new Guinness record for circumnavigating the globe by bike. Rouleur magazine recently held its annual show in London, a two-day extravaganza of all things cycling. Tour de France winners were in attendance, but one of the most viewed exhibits was the bike Wilcox used on her recent global ride. She is that celebrated.

Wilcox was born and raised in Alaska, and didn’t leave the state until she moved south to attend Puget Sound. She began cycling after high school, though, as she says, she thought of it as more transport than sport. It was a means of utilitarian freedom. She traveled for seven years on a bike before she even entered a race. “It was a way to see the world and learn about it,” she says. “But it just kept staying so exciting and so full of learning about myself. I didn’t realize I had that kind of capacity until I went and did it.”

It’s what attracts Wilcox to her bike. That she can still push it, still love it, still find new places to go, both on the planet and within herself. “Sometimes I’ll even do something way out of my comfort zone just to see how I’ll react,” she says. “I think I’m drawn to what I haven’t tried before.”

Inspiration comes in all sizes and shapes. Emma Smith might be—okay, not might be, is—the only student at Puget Sound currently enrolled in international political economy and theatre arts. Her hometown of Los Angeles wasn’t the best cycling environment, but her father was a keen mountain biker, and so they rode in and around LA, Malibu, even up at Mammoth. She’s used to hills, which is fortunate, she says, because there are a few of those around Tacoma. “My favorite is to bomb down 30th Street,” she says, laughing. “It’s a big hill and once you’re at the bottom, you’re basically at the Sound. Swan Creek Park is also beautiful and PSO (Puget Sound Outdoors) goes there a lot.”

PSO provides student-led experiences that connect students with each other and the environment. Smith, a senior, says the rides are great exercise and a good way see the area and be part of a community, but more than anything, it’s about those magical moments when you’re “earning your turns” and flying along. “It’s just so freeing.”

Claire Bargman, a junior studying biology and environmental policy and decision making, says she believes cycling invokes another kind of reward, one she calls the butterfly effect. Bargman grew up in Minnesota and chose Puget Sound for the ecosystem at two levels: it offered nicer winters than Minnesota and it was such rich ground for her studies. “There’s this giant ripple effect on our lives that cycling creates,” says Bargman. “Cycling led to teaching mountain biking, and from that, my boss encouraged me to teach cross-country skiing. After instructing both sports, I figured it would be fun to work at the local bike and ski shop. This pushed me to work in skiing out in Colorado during a gap year. It really led into a whole trajectory of education and learning.”

The joy Bargman finds in cycling lies in the way it both commands her attention and allows her to see outside herself. She has also found it gratifying to teach cycling to young girls who might be timid at the start. It’s all part of the butterfly effect, a wing of existence beating gently to create a breeze that helps propel movement forward. “There’s no doubt cycling unlocked one door and allowed for so many others to open up.”

Students like Bargman and Smith take classes, ride bikes, and are open to new ideas. These and other factors led Professor Bill Kupinse to create and run a new course this year, Writing Bikes. Kupinse, who has been teaching English at Puget Sound for two decades, realized once settled in Tacoma that he derived the most consistent joy riding his bike every day to and from campus. “I don’t think people in cars could say that,” he adds.

It dawned on Kupinse that there was a substantial literature around bicycles and cycling. So he created a new syllabus and held the Writing Bikes course last fall with 19 students. Kupinse says he wanted to use literature to explore how the bicycle has been a vehicle of social activism, from the suffrage movement more than a century ago to the fight for climate justice today. Writing Bikes combines Kupinse’s experience teaching creative writing and environmental humanities with cycling, bike repair, and writing in all genres. “We read bike-related fiction, memoir, journalism,” he says. “Students produced their own bike-centered creative writing. We biked from campus to Vashon Island on a class field trip. For their final exam, students built a bike together from old parts.”

Kupinse believes there’s a natural affinity between cycling and writing. “Cycling is this portal into a uniquely joyful and meditative space. Writing involves a similar kind of reflection. I wanted this class to help us think about the connection between the two.”

Cycling is so often about joy and contemplation, but for Clara Brown ’17 it was linked to healing. Brown suffered a gymnastics accident in March 2008 when she was 12 years old. She crushed two vertebrae, damaged her spinal cord, and was paralyzed from the neck down. After intensive therapy and rehab, she was able to eventually walk again but with limitations to her mobility. Another stop along the healing path was a hip replacement in 2011. She joined her high school rowing team as a coxswain, but she was still searching for an athletic and competitive outlet under her own power.

Brown stepped into the cox role for the university’s rowing team upon her arrival at Puget Sound, where she was a Matelich Scholar. One of her rowers mentioned he worked in a bike shop. She told him she aspired to be more active. “He suggested I get a road bike and ride for fitness and to relieve stress and to get all those other benefits that cycling brings,” she recalls. “I was concerned how I’d work the brakes or do the shifting. He was adamant that a bicycle is an adaptive tool and that there were plenty of ways to modify a bike to fit me.”

Brown went home to Maine that summer and worked with a local bike store to find technical solutions in adapting a bike. “I remember when I went home with the bike for the first time, I was literally giddy,” she says. “That first ride on my new bike, a bike built for me, I remember it so well. I was unsteady. My dad was nervous. But it all came back to me so quickly. The first couple miles were nerve-wracking, but by the end I was just so thrilled! I couldn’t get enough.”

Back on campus that fall, she joined a cycling club and rode all through college. After graduating, while working as a cycling tour guide for a large international company, she met a person on the U.S. Paralympic Advisory Committee. He spotted her raw athletic gifts and linked her up to the Olympic and Paralympic communities. In June 2018, she attended a talent identification camp and showed great potential. After that, she raced in a World Cup event, came in third, and kept going from strength to strength, medal to medal, title to title. The culmination, to date, of Brown’s astonishing athletic ascent came at the 2024 Paris Paralympics. Brown knew that the road race was her best chance to medal and that’s where she put her focus and energy. “I was anxious about it,” she says. “Because with road racing, anything can happen. So much is out of your control.” After a frantic sprint finish between four riders, Brown came away with a bronze medal.

"I’m just so proud of it,” says Brown. “My family was at the finish line. It was so emotional to win that medal for all those people who’ve been helping literally since the day I had my accident. It just shows how influential the bicycle has been in my life.” 

That sense of exploration, of pushing boundaries, doesn’t just apply to elite athletes. Patty English, manager of administration with Facilities Services, began riding to accompany her son as he tried to earn his Scouts merit badge in cycling. On one of their first rides, they did 13 miles and during the ride English thought she was going to keel over. “But you know what?” she laughs. “When we got back, I thought, wow, that was really fun. I actually like this.” 

English kept on cycling and found the more she rode, the more she loved it. In fact, English’s entry into the world of cycling is a kind of inspiration to those of us who want to take up cycling or return to it. You don’t have to be an elite athlete, you just have to love being on two wheels. It was so enjoyable and beneficial at the same time, that English ended up improving her overall health and fitness significantly. “At the time, I was quite overweight,” she says. “But within about four years of starting to ride, I found I’d lost a hundred pounds!” 

At one point, after about five years of riding, her old road bike was stolen, which allowed her to upgrade to a better bike. She’d been riding purely for pleasure on weekends, but the positive reinforcement of having a great bike meant she began riding more and more. So she upgraded again to a full carbon road bike and now rides nearly every day. “Riding is about the pleasure for me,” says English. “But it’s more than that. I find when I’m riding, I get into this state of mental clarity. It’s almost euphoria. I could solve all the world’s problems!” 

English has now cycled in many countries around the world and has plans in the works to ride in Canada, Ireland, and Croatia. “Not quite as many [places] as my hero, Lael Wilcox!” she says. “But when you’re on a bike, you’re part of the environment in a way that you aren’t in a car. It just offers this feeling of being free of everything and free from everything. The stress, the worry, it all disappears.”

Puget Sound is a great place to be part of the environment, since it’s one of the world’s richest ecosystems. Peter Hodum, professor of biology and chair of Environmental Studies & Sciences, has been on faculty since 2005. He’s a lifelong cyclist and bike commuter. “It’s so enjoyable,” he says, “but it’s so valuable too for environmental reasons. It’s just a great way to move around the world.”

There is a strong connection between his teaching and cycling, in that it’s a way to educate and model for his students, to create a relationship with the planet. They talk about sustainability, increasing bike lanes, and issues around equity and access, not just on campus but across the Tacoma area generally. One of his former students was Clara Brown. “She was very understated about her story,” says Hodum. “It wasn’t until after she graduated that I realized how remarkable she was!”

Doug Sackman, professor and chair of the History department, grew up cycling beside the American River in Sacramento on a trail built and supported by local entrepreneur Charles Goethe and named after 19th-century explorer Jedediah Smith. It wasn’t until years later that Sackman and others recognized Goethe was a eugenicist who praised the Nazis before and after World War II, and Smith was a ruthless pillager who leveled many horrors on local Indigenous peoples. “I rode through that landscape with such innocence,” Sackman recalls. “You can still love the space, but it’s important to also think about its history. I had no idea until later that there was such racism written into that landscape.” Sackman has worked to help repudiate that racism and repair relationships through his scholarship. The park along the trail once honoring a eugenicist has been renamed Riverbend after its natural features. The river bike trail still ends at Discovery Park, which is fitting—bike riding has always taken Sackman on journeys of discovery, and rediscovery.

Sackman and his wife live on Vashon Island, and he still occasionally does the two-wheeled commute (a journey of just over an hour, including the ferry). He’s a veteran of many long-distance rides, including the 154-mile RAMROD (Ride Around Mount Rainier in One Day) and the Vashon Passport to Pain ride, which includes the legendary Burma Hill grade that maxes out at 29 percent. “Riding can be reflective, it can be creative, [and] I can come up with ideas for teaching,” says Sackman. “Organized rides tend to be a little more intense but usually there are other people there to share in the suffering! But often it’s just a way to find a place of introspection, of being unplugged.”

Lael Wilcox was out in nature every day for three and a half months. It’s only fitting to circle back to her at the end of our story, since she’s the one who circled the globe on a bike. It’s difficult to properly capture the physical, emotional, and psychological strength needed for such a journey. Consider the numbers: more than 18,000 miles of riding over 108 days, 12 hours, and 12 minutes. She averaged 167 miles a day, even accounting for four travel days to fly from continent to continent. Her journey began in Chicago in late May. She rode to New York City, flew to Portugal, rode across Spain, France, Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, across the Alps and the Balkans, through Türkiye and Georgia. From there, she flew to Perth, Australia, rode 5,000 miles across Australia, did both the South and North Islands of New Zealand, then flew to Alaska and rode the entire western side of North America before heading back to Chicago and the finish line.

To meet the qualifications for the Guinness record, she had to ride a minimum of 18,000 miles. Every day had to be recorded through GPS and had to feature at least three site photos and a location witness—and there were two factors that helped with this. First, Wilcox’s wife, Rue, is a documentary filmmaker who recorded the whole ride. And second, much to the delight of Wilcox, thousands of people joined her at various points along the way. “I just put the word out via social media where I was every day,” says Wilcox. “I’m guessing around 3,000 people came out and rode with me! I met so many wonderful people.”

There were setbacks and challenges, including sleep, nutrition, weather, mechanical issues, political realities, the occasional crash, and even a case of poison ivy in Germany. But she made it. “You’ve got to have some courage and a body that can put up with it,” she says. “But you’ve just got to love being on a bike. Breathing the air. Hearing the sounds. Seeing the sights. Time spent on a bike is never time wasted. You can process everything you’re experiencing, everything you’re learning. Yes, there’s a lot of stimulation, but there are also opportunities to let your mind go free.”

They just keep coming up, those words and feelings. Freedom. Joy. Learning. There’s a reason why so many tropes of our culture, from family stories to television commercials, have to do with kids learning how to ride a bike. The delight is universal yet individual, and it’s always there. “Riding a bike is so full of freedom and independence, so simple but magical,” says Wilcox. “I just don’t see anybody on a bike, ever, who doesn’t have that smile of excitement and joy on their face.”

As the people of Puget Sound demonstrate, you can find those moments any day you choose, in your own place, in your own way. All you have to do is get on your bike, and you’ll be transported.

Curtis Gillespie is a writer based in Edmonton, Alberta, who has won seven Canadian National Magazine Awards for his writing on culture, politics, sport, and science.