My Hour Quotes

“They say he averaged 507 watts for the Hour so he just beasted it out for the 60 minutes. With what we know now about aerodynamics and the power Miguel could produce it’s frightening to think what he could have done for an Hour if he had sat a little bit better on his bike.”
― Bradley Wiggins, My Hour

“The challenges I’ve set myself throughout my career have been quite big, quite bold. There had to be a huge risk of failure, because that is what would make me think it was worth pushing myself. I’ve always felt that the bar had to be set really high, to make sure that I truly had to respect what I was doing.”
― Bradley Wiggins, My Hour

“CSC and Bjarne Riis, who said something that’s stuck with me for ten years: his philosophy was ‘You never know how hard you can tighten something until it breaks’. Whether you are training, overtraining, or trying to get to your perfect race weight, you never know how far to push yourself until you actually break down.”
― Bradley Wiggins, My Hour

“As well as the air pressure, the other thing we couldn’t really control was the temperature, although we did try to keep it in check. You need warm air as it’s easier to push through, because the air molecules move about more as they heat up, but obviously you don’t want it too hot because if your core body temperature gets too high you are in trouble. We wanted it at 27 degrees, but the building ended up getting to 30 degrees, with the crowd in there.”
― Bradley Wiggins, My Hour

“For every 20 millibars the air pressure goes up, your lap time increases by 0.1sec. For example, in Manchester I had been travelling at 55km/h in training, which roughly equated to Tony Rominger’s second record; on days when the pressure was 990 millibars I’d do 30 minutes at 55km/h putting out 410 watts. My aerobic threshold is between 420 and 460 watts, so putting out that power I could have kept going at that pace for an hour and a half. That was why we started working towards the 55km target. In London on the day, however, because the air pressure was 1,036 millibars, to cover 54.5km in the hour I had to average 440 watts; to stick to that 55km/h schedule would have taken 460 watts, which I couldn’t sustain. The pace I went depended on the pressure on the day. The difference can be huge – when Chris did his hour in 1996 he had something like 955 millibars.”
― Bradley Wiggins, My Hour

“Cycling is quite a pure sport in that sense: it is mainly about suffering, whether you are climbing the Tourmalet, racing up Mont Ventoux, trying to survive in Paris-Roubaix, or doing a club ten-mile time trial on your local course. You’re just trying to hang on to a pace.”
― Bradley Wiggins, My Hour