It seems like the professional athletes in cycling are always trying to get media attention by saying something extreme to garner it.    What happened to modesty and just letting your accomplishments speak for themselves?

Case in point is an article today on Bradley Wiggins’ hour record attempt.  Bradley, Mr. Modesty himself, says he could break the hour record today and plans to ride a distance that will stand for the next 20 years.  WTF is that all about?

His exact quote is – “I’ve got 55km in my head and I think it’s realistic. And I think if I do it, it will stand for 20 years.”

He is pretty much saying that he is the best athlete in the sport currently, and the best of the next generation too, right?   Man, he thinks a lot of himself.  Maybe he forgot that Chris Boardman, a fellow Brit, rode 56.375 km back in 1996, using the superman position.  He averaged 57.7 km/h the last 6 km, which is nearly 36 mph.  ( I guess that was nearly 20 years ago too.)

I’ve never been too big on “Sir Bradley”.  I don’t understand how he could win the Olympics a couple times at 185 pounds, then win the Tour de France at 150, now currently be racing  at 172.  That is just too weird for me.  Plus, he has a potty mouth and acts out too often for my liking.

Anyway, I assume he’ll smash the hour record next month.  He probably knows his wattage output and what that translates into for an hour on the track.  I really don’t care much.

I wish these guys would just shut up and ride their bikes.  Such boldness, or more like arrogance in this case, makes me think that they know something that we all don’t.  I’ve never known if I was going to be great on any particular day.  I hoped to be, but sometimes I just didn’t show up.  I think that is the way of athletics.  When you have such a supreme confidence, enough to outright just state it, then it sounds screwy.   And in today’s world, screwy in sports doesn’t interest me so much.

It had been 11 months and 10 days since I last rode a criterium.  That is the time since I broke my left hip at a criterium in Davenport Iowa on May 27th of last year.  I went back and read the post and am mildly amused how optimistic I was about that injury.  I said that it wasn’t even going to be 2 months for the recovery.  I was off by a lot.  I could hardly walk at 2 months.

Anyway, it is going on close to a year now and I’m still in the recovery process.  I have to admit, there are some days I don’t even think about it, but most days, something goes a little screwy down there at least once.

Anyway, I finally raced on the road, a training criterium, but was just a criterium.  I drove down to Texas, planning on going to Austin, to race the Driveway Series Criterium last night, but it looked like it was raining in Austin and it wasn’t going to rain further North, so I made the call and did the Fair Park Criterium in Dallas.

And it was the right call.  I have to admit, I was a tad bit worried how I was going to be.  I’m not really riding all that well and haven’t done any speed work in ages.  It was fine.  It was fine because of the course and the field.

The course is at the Fairgrounds and it is a long 4 corner rectangle.  Wide open corners and a really safe race, which is great for a training race.  Ginny King puts on the race and has been asking me for ages to come by and race.  I’m so happy I finally made it.

30 minutes before the start, during the B race, it started raining a little.  But just a little.  I told myself I can’t be selfish and race in the rain.  It wouldn’t make any sense to do that just now.  But, after doing a lap, it was all right hand corners, so my left hip was sort of out of play.

There were close to 80 guys in the A race, which I was happy about.  I thought I needed a lot of places to hide, but I now looking back upon it, I didn’t.  I was planning to just ride around in the group, which is exactly what I did.

I don’t have much to really report.  I kind of just sat in the field and did a ton of accelerations.  I wasn’t as pitiful as I had anticipated and really never got winded.  Brett Crosby rules this race and he put in a few big surges off the front.  It was a great course for a training race.  Easy in the field, extremely hard in the front in the wind.  Perfect.  Lots of guys said they were sorry to hear about Bromont, which was super nice.

They did abruptly ring the bell about 10 minutes before the scheduled finish and called 1 lap to go.  I had seen some lightening and it was looking like it might storm.  There were 8 or so guys just a bit off the front then and some of the guys in the field didn’t really hear that it was one to go.  I just went hard enough to stay at the front and finished somewhere between 10-12th I think. Not that it mattered, but I wasn’t ready for the race to be over.  It was too fun.

Anyway, it was nice knowing that sitting in a field, even though it was just a flat, wide open criterium, wasn’t hard.  I thought I might be a little nervous about the bike handling, but that wasn’t an issue at all.  Weird as that is.  Guess the saying, it’s just like riding a bike applies here.

At the start.