Bradley Wiggins

“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

“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