Did the C race yesterday around the Champs and really enjoyed it.
I’m a Cat C rider anyway, but weigh 94kg, so only really challenge on flat routes. The others I do for fun and variation.
The race was really fast, but not B pace sandbag fast like a lot of Crits. Top end Cat C but manageable with a big front group that broke up on the small climbs…but large groups were still maintained for the chase. It was probably the most enjoyable race I’ve had outside of WTRL or small fields, as it all felt quite fair.
Think this change is long overdue and good to see it working so well initially. Would be interesting to see how it worked on a hillier course, or with a smaller field, but it’s generally encouraging. I do generally avoid races where there’s obviously some sandbaggers which really limits my options, so looking forward to Cat enforcement being rolled out more.
Those moaning are only doing it because their sandbagging or cruising is getting shown up. You may enjoy gaming the system to get the odd podium but it ruins racing for the majority.
I just can’t see any logical meat on the bones of your argument at all. You are literally saying the new category logic doesn’t work, because it makes you one of the weakest riders in the field. If it was tweaked so you are one of the strongest again, it would be fine. Your CP puts you above the category boundaries, not due to a bug, but because that’s what your ability shows.
Don’t you realise that if it did put you in cat C, against the category logic, that wouldn’t be fair to the legitimate cat C riders?
Maybe just skip racing altogether and we can set up a GoFundMe for a cat C medal.
Commentators have acknowledged it’s not great being at the bottom end of a category, and have suggested ways that this can be improved in the future, but you are not interested in that either.
Honestly, I expected some noisy responses by those suddenly finding themselves legitimately in a higher category, but this one takes the biscuit.
I’m not sure what data you are looking at. Your power numbers yesterday are lower across all time scales compared to your best and beyond very short timescales they are also lower than what you called your best from the previous before. Your whole race average was below most of your races. If you do races back to back you will be down on power despite it feeling as equally hard
i agree you are on the limit of the cat and i would not expect you to be able to hang onto A+ wheels but that does not mean you need to race down a cat. Cat ranges are big not everyone will get to the finish line in one big group. Riders drop that’s natural but yesterday you held that group so I don’t see any indication so far to suggest that the category was wrong.
Maybe after doing some non double draft races we’ll get more data but it all looks good so far.
My numbers were low because I couldn’t sprint at all due to riding all the race at treshold.
My numbers are very very high for 45 minutes. But nothing left at the end. The As with me were sprinting at 11-12 wkg when I was at 8… which is not my usual numbers, as shown on the graph you posted.
That’s why you can tell I was at my maximum.
Had I been going easy, cruising, I would have had my normal power at the end, so much higher.
Riding 45 minutes at treshold is way more difficult and painful than even a ftp test.
You beat me by 10 places! And I went as hard as I could, have a 4.4w/kg FTP, and have been cat A for over a year and race ZRL A1, including picking up decent points.
Honestly! It’s mindblowing. Racing is hard. You might not know that from cruising cat B for so long, but that’s how it should be.
Maximum of my abilities : this compares this ride with my personal bests for this year and 42 days.
You can see that for efforts longer than 30 minutes it is my best.
Very hard for me to evaluate last night’s B race, because the only other race over 30mins I’ve done this year was A Clydesdale/Athena race on 1st Jan. Before that, I’m not sure I’ve raced close to or beyond an hour since the winter STW league that finished in early Feb '21.
TTs are my goto events, but the sub 15min lunch races since Jan suited me because I wanted to start doing more z5 efforts after barely doing any z4+ Nov to the end of '21 after my four week flu that hit me for six.
It was a bit of a novelty to just about stay in a ~20-strong group last night, albeit very close to the very back of the field. I did my best 50secs-2min30 and 38-52mins of the last 90 days according to ZP, probably goes back close to a year for both, while finishing 149th!
Especially with massive entry fields, “double draft” is going to horribly skew the test results, it’s an awful test option when DD generally isn’t the norm for races as a whole from my experience.
I’ve signed up for the 1700 GMT test event today, whether I’ve got the energy after work earlier and yesterday’s race to give it a proper go is another matter.
Just out of the 1400GMT Figure 8 Cat D race. I enjoyed it, but then as someone who’s fallen the right side of the pen boundaries I suppose that’s somewhat natural.
Though I can’t help but feel slightly odd about it all; it was great being able to get into the lead group (and not having the pace blown off by anyone that shouldn’t be there, myself possibly excluded), and whilst I was working hard for the 55mins or so (and I’ve no idea how much anyone else had left in the tank at any point), I’ve done two major [for me] efforts in that race (trust me to spend so long dropping ride ons to people over the reverse KoM to miss everyone else attacking into the descent!), done the rest as hard as I’ve needed to and I’ve still only averaged 2.3W/kg over the race (and I’ve evidently not tripped any category calculations as I can still sign up for D by the looks of things)
I know if I was in the shape I could/should be I’d be having a much less fun time scrabbling 10mins off the pace in C, (and doing enough in these events in order to stay in the double draft was key), but I wonder if longer term with these pens if the top of D coalesces around the sort of performance that’s going to be enough to shell weaker riders off the front, but not enough to push anyone into upgrading.
You beat me, you are lighter than me, and I am not even a lower-cat A. I had to work hard and therefore also couldn’t access my best sprint. That’s racing.
You’re a Cat A on the old system, let alone the new one. Let it go.
nobody thinks you are cruising but the suggestion that you think you should be in B is not backed up by any of the data from the race yesterday.
you finished with the front group your power numbers were below your max ability so it makes no sense why you think yesterday was not a success and positive step forward for racing.
Have you noticed that in any forum, be it about muscle cars, espresso machines or gardening, there is always that guy. Someone asks something, someone replies, someone else chimes in. But then comes that guy and types a one-liner, something like “no ure wrong its not like that its like this”. And everybody’s like whoaah, the Man spoke again, listen to the Man! And the one writing the original reply says yes of course you’re right, silly me, what do I know? And then that guy slowly sinks beneath the surface again for a bit.
I’m not that guy, never was, never will be, have always known. When I decided I had had enough a few years ago and came here, I had things to say that I couldn’t realistically convey in a one-liner, not if people (or, more importantly, Zwift) were to actually get it.
I noticed in the last few months that people in here started to talk about things like e.g. effort or weight in a meaningful way completely independently. The discourse had finally changed, a bit. It took that long.
And you can probably guess my scroll speed when people write one-liners in here. Sorry, no executive summaries for you or anyone else. Read it or don’t.
Try to think about not only what I say, if you ever bother to read, but also why I say it, when I say it, and who the real recipient is each time. There’s always a thought. Always.
Oh, and thank me later. You never did. I’m not stopping here. We need to push further still. You will see, if we don’t. And we need to do it now or the window will close. Can’t you see that? If you can’t, then you’re in for another aeon of “meaningful conversation”.
Please take your arguments to Facebook where they belong, the constant arguing in these threads makes them unbearable to read and actually hear meaningful feedback.
