Juliana Buhring
Raised in a closed religious cult across dozens of countries, she cycled around the world alone as an adult
Juliana Buhring was born into the Children of God, a closed religious movement, and spent her childhood moved between communes in numerous countries, with little conventional schooling and limited contact with life outside the group. She left as a young adult with few practical resources, having to build basic life skills, education and a sense of personal identity essentially from scratch in her twenties.
She took up long-distance cycling partly as a way of imposing structure and independence on a life that had offered her almost none as a child, and in 2012 set out to cycle around the world entirely unsupported, carrying her own supplies and repairing her own equipment without a back-up vehicle or team, across a route of roughly eighteen thousand miles through varied and sometimes hostile terrain and weather.
She completed the circumnavigation in around a hundred and fifty-two days, becoming the first woman recorded to cycle around the world unsupported, a physically gruelling pace that left comparatively little room for rest days across the many months on the road. She went on to co-found competitive ultra-distance cycling races for women, arguing that the sport's endurance events had for years been designed and marketed almost entirely around male competitors.
She has also written publicly about her upbringing in the Children of God, including the abuse many children in the movement experienced, work that runs alongside her cycling career as a second, harder kind of long-distance honesty.