Scarlet Zeigler was about 250 miles into the bike ride when she started to feel it.
It felt like an out-of-body experience. She felt woozy. She would stop periodically, lean against a tree beside the trail, and take her shoes off. Her feet were burning. Her neck was seized up. During the night – riding alone on a dark trail in the middle of nowhere – she kept craning her neck, looking behind her as she rode, checking to see whether someone was following her. “I get paranoid,” she said.
Now that the sun was up, she stopped doing that and soon she couldn’t turn her head. “My legs felt good,” she said. “My knees felt good. My hips felt good. I just couldn’t turn my neck.”
The 16-year-old cyclist kept going. She was aiming to beat the world record for the distance covered during a 24-hour period for cyclists under 18. She hoped to cover 300 miles, which would shatter the previous record of 282.6 miles set by an Indian named Shivras Thorat.
She had 50 miles to go.
She had earbuds and was listening to Hannah Montana. She lip-synched the words as she rode. She couldn’t sing, she said. She was so exhausted that she rested her forehead on her handlebars as she kept pedaling.
She recalled that she got into this to see how far she could push herself. “It’s like racing against yourself,” she said. “It’s just you and your bicycle.”
And she thought about how she wanted to accomplish big things.
She refueled with a sandwich from a Sheetz convenience store and pushed on.
Just 50 miles.
Just having ‘type two fun’
Scarlet is a slim teenager, with dark hair, a green streak dyed in the back. She was wearing bicycle earrings and a T-shirt from a company in England that produces bike accessories, one of her sponsors, as she talked about her world record in the living room of her family’s warm and cozy farmhouse north of Dover. She is homeschooled and works on a goat farm. She loves her goats.
She can’t remember the first time she rode a bike. Her father, Flint, a former BMX cyclist, singer-songwriter and powerlifter, bought her her first bike, a little pink bike, as soon as she could walk. She was riding before that, nestled in a baby papoose strapped to her father’s chest as he rode.
She went on her first long bike ride when she was 2. Her father and mother, Jana, rode a tandem bike along the Outer Banks in North Carolina, Scarlett riding in a baby carrier. They towed a bob trailer with their camping gear, the entire rig, her mother recalled, longer than some cars on the road.
As they rode from Hatteras, they saw destruction. Hurricane Christopher had ripped through the Outer Banks not long ago, and the islands were still recovering. When they stopped to camp, Jana recalled, the campground was reduced to piles of sticks. Flint knocked on the door of the caretaker’s cabin and was told, “If you can clear a space, you can camp here.”
They repeated the trip in the summer of 2019 to celebrate Jana’s 40th birthday. Scarlet was 10 and rode her own bike. The first day out, she recalled, she got sun poisoning, raising purple blisters on her thighs. She rode the rest of the way in the summer heat wearing long pants, a long-sleeved shirt and a hat, she said.
As they rode, Jana said, Hurricane Dorian was taking aim at the Outer Banks. The wind almost knocked them over, she said. “It was brutal,” she said. As they pedaled toward the ferry, Jana recalled, people racing to catch the last chance to escape what would be the worst storm of the year to strike the East Coast drove past them, not stopping to help. One man, driving a pickup truck, yelled, “You guys are like vikings!”
When they got to the ferry, they were able to ride past the the cars waiting in line to board.
It was what the family refers to as “type two fun,” Jana said. “It’s not fun when it’s happening, but when you look back on it…”
Scarlet said, “That’s really how it all started.”
Going the distance
Scarlet, for a while, followed in her father’s footsteps, competing in BMX races. It was fun, she said, but she soon wanted to try a different challenge. There were only two other girls in her age group at the local track who were competitive. She needed more.
Her first long ride was on a family trip, a two-week excursion from Washington to Pittsburgh, taking the South Chesapeake Trail to Cumberland, Maryland, where they picked up the Great Allegheny Passage to Pittsburgh, a 330-mile ride.
A 400-mile ride through the Blue Ridge Mountains, from Skyline Drive in Virginia, to Cherokee, North Carolina, followed. Other rides followed, a 300-mile-long trek from New York State to just outside Hagerstown, Maryland. She set a personal best, covering 89 miles in one day on the C&O Canal trail. That got her hooked on long-distance cycling. “I love the challenge,” she said. “How fast and how far can I go.”
That trip wound up with her gaining a sponsor. Her dad, feeling a bit frustrated with her bike bag, ripped the bag as he pulled it from her bike. They contacted the manufacturer, Restrap, which makes high-end biking gear in Yorkshire, England, asking whether they could repair it. In his letter to the company, her father mentioned that the bag belonged to his 10-year-old daughter who had just completed an 89-mile-long ride in one day. The company’s chief responded, “Wow! A 10-year-old doing 89 miles. That’s crazy.” The company sent a new bag and offered to make Scarlett a member of their ambassador team. The resulting sponsorship has resulted in trips to England to ride.
And then, when Scarlet was 13, she and her dad decided to tackle the Great Divide, a 2,900-mile ride from Banff in western Canada to the Mexican border, the longest uninterrupted mountain bike route in the world.
The yin and the yang of it
It took 42 days.
The natural beauty of the terrain was breathtaking, among the most beautiful sights she’s ever seen – crystal-clear lakes and forests and seas of wildflowers. The beauty was offset by the brutality of the trail, riding through mountainous terrain in isolated areas. Riding through the thin air at high altitudes, the body deprived of the level of oxygen needed to continue pumping the pedals. Montana was the toughest state, she wrote in an essay about the trip. “It was chock-full of rocky, steep climbs,” she wrote.
During the ride, they would run short on food and water. They would go days without cell service; should an emergency arise, they would not be able to call for help. They both lost weight. Scarlet missed her goats.
“You don’t think how mentally and emotionally taxing that route can be,” Scarlet said.
When they returned home, Scarlet said, she and her parents had a rough time. She felt depressed, what she called “post-adventure depression.” She had a hard time adjusting, going from 42 days of tough going to a safe, comfortable home. “The sudden change can throw you into a lot,” she said. “It was a difficult year. It was very, very difficult.”
Her difficulties led her to work with the Trevor Project, a nonprofit organization dedicated to suicide prevention and helping those in need of mental health care. She recently raised more than $800 for the project on a bike ride in England, sponsored by Restrap.
She said, “I love the difficulty. I love riding. The different stories (of the difficulty afterwards) need to be told. It’s two sides of the story, the yin and the yang.”
Another hurricane during a ride
She was riding in the car with her dad, on her way to the 4-H Center, in late February or early March in 2024 when her father asked her about her goals for the coming year or so. She said, “I need to do something big.”
She did some research and found out that Thorat, a 15-year-old boy from India, had set the record for the number of miles covered during 24 hours. “I was like, hmmm, wonder if I can do that,” she said.
Scarlet did some math and figured she’d have to average 12.5 mph to hit 300 miles. With stops, she figured she’d have to average slightly more, perhaps 13 mph. It was doable, she thought.
She began training. She rode nearly every day when she took a day off from riding, she lifted weights and worked on her twitch and aerobic stamina.
At 5 p.m. Sept. 28, she set off on the C&O Canal trail at Boston, a village southeast of Pittsburgh. She selected that trail because it is relatively flat, “easy spinning,” she said. She figured starting at 5 p.m. was optimal because after riding through the night, the sunrise would wake her up and energize her. Her parents would meet her every 30 or 60 miles to provide water, protein shakes and food during her five-minute breaks.
Then, it started raining. Hard.
The heavy rain turned the trail into a quagmire, her tires sinking in the muck, requiring a lot more energy to maintain the average speed she needed to break the record, she said. Felled trees blocked the trail and she had to stop to lift her bike over them.
She was covered with so much mud and silt that she couldn’t even wipe it from her face, she said. “It was an absolute mess,” she said.
At 6:06 a.m. Sept. 29, 12 hours and six minutes and 151 miles into the ride, she gave up.
It was a hard decision. “I love riding in the rain,” she said. “It’s so much fun. Until the trail got really bad, I was having the time of my life.”
She got home, hosed off out back of the house and took a shower. Then, checking the news, the rain she rode through was caused by the outer bands of Hurricane Helene, the worst storm since Katrina. “That’s what I was riding through,” she said.
She hunkered down and over the winter trained hard.
She would take another stab at it in the spring.
‘I gave it everything I had’
By April, she said, she was ready to go. She was determined. “I thought I was going to make it through,” she said. “I thought I was going to have the record.”
She started out at 5 p.m. April 18. The weather was good, she said. “No rain. No flooding. No trees down.” It was a bit muggy, but not too hot.
By the time she arrived in Paw Paw, West Virginia – where she had quit in September – she was seven miles ahead of schedule. She was tired and could barely keep her eyes open, she said. “But I kept pedaling.”
She got to 285 miles with an hour and half to go.
The record was hers, or so she thought.
Her father had checked and since the last time Scarlet checked the World Ultracycling Association website, the record had fallen. An Italian named Riccardo Sporzon and upped the record to 290.2 miles. (Scarlet’s record is not recorded on the World Ultracycling website because her mother explained the association required Scarlet to join and pay a $200 membership fee and then, another fee to post the record. The Guinness Book of World Records doesn’t keep a complete list of cycling records because, Scarlet said, “there are just too many of them.”)
She pedaled on.
With half an hour left, she hit 291 miles. When she finished, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds after she started, she had covered 294.3 miles.
She tried to process it. She texted her dad, “I broke the record.” She texted her best friend. She texted Restrap, thanking the company for its support.
She was elated, but exhausted. “I gave it everything I had,” she said.
She was leaning on her bike, holding on for dear life, she said, because if she let go, she would topple over. Her father offered to take the bike and she said, “No, I need to hang onto it.”
She celebrated with slushy and Chinese food in Frederick, Maryland. She stayed in the car while her mother fetched it from the carry-out. She couldn’t get out of the car, she said. “My muscles were burning,” she said. “Then, my knees would go to my knees, and then back to my muscles. I couldn’t move.”
She stayed awake during the hour and a half drive home. When she got home, she said, “I hobbled into the shower and passed out right after that.”
The next big thing
Scarlet already has plans for 2025. She hopes to race in the Sea Otter Classic, a 90-mile race on a gravel trail in Monterrey, California. And she plans to ride Dale’s Divide, a 600-kilometer ride from Arnside on the west coast of England across the Yorkshire Dales to Scarborough on the east coast, returning to the west coast through the York Moors.
Her ultimate goal is to compete in the Tour Divide, a race that covers the route from Canada to Mexico that she and her father rode. They covered it in 42 days. The record for the 2,745-mile race is 11 days and 13 hours. Her goal is to cover the route in 14 days.
“I rode the Great Divide, but I’ll race it this time,” she said. “That’s my next big thing.”
Columnist/reporter Mike Argento has been a York Daily Record staffer since 1982. Reach him at mike@ydr.com.
This article originally appeared on York Daily Record: Dover Twp. PA girl, 16, sets world record for 24-hour bike ride