How to recognize my real competitors in race

Hi, I have just finished my first race here and I two questions :slight_smile:

  1. Zwiftpower DQ me, because I had 2,9 w/kg in D category a gave me a C category as a minimum. Of course I respect it, but I am not sure why other riders who had this w/kg weren´t DQ

  2. How should I recognize a pack where should I ride in and competitors from zwiftpower? I am aware that for example in D category is a lot of riders who are better than that, so are there any clues what riders should I focus on?

Thanks a lot for answers on these beginner questions :slight_smile:

Hi @Marek_Kabat

Welcome to Zwift racing.

What race did you do, can you post the Zwift Power (ZP) link to the race? That will help me answer Q1

When you pick your category you will see a letter next to your name D is yellow and C is Blue. You need to look on the riders list and chase the ones in the same group as you.

Sure :slight_smile:

Yes, I understand how to recognize riders who has attended in D category, but not all of them are my real competitors according to zwiftpower.

That is the problem zit Zwift racing, the good news is Zwift is working on a solution for that.

Ok so you need to look at the 95% of 20 min power. Then ZP will have a small tolerance (0.1w/kg) if you entered your correct Category. So the limit for D is 2.49w/kg + 0.1 = 2.6w/kg

ZP use the average of your best 3 races in the last 3 months.
image

See this link.

During the race you can check the LIVE tab on the Zwiftpower page for your event where you can see the other riders’ assigned categories at the beginning of each line (use a category filter to select just the category you’re riding in to make the list easier to read). Riders are listed in the order of their positions in the race so by finding higher-category riders in front of you you can see who are NOT your real competitors.

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OK, that makes sense, thanks. So I will have a lot of painful races and low results in cat C with my 2.69 :smiley:

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Yes, I was counting on this, but it didn´t work. Does it happen a lot?

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Sadly yes, But you will get stronger and faster and beat your mates IRL.

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I’m right there with you, I just bumped up a category too

I used to care much more about who my real competition was when I was a strong rider in my category but now I just have to focus on racing whoever’s around me since I’m pretty far away from the front now. Racing is still fun though!

Haven’t noticed this myself (though I don’t really have the surplus to make sense of it when racing), but Zwiftpower is rather overextended these days because of the massive increase in event participants, so occasional partial outages certainly wouldn’t surprise me.

My advice is go for a hard effort at the start. Whatever group you end up in after a few minutes try to stay with. You’ll have to adjust your approach based on experience. If you find you are in a group that you feel is too easy then you didn’t go hard enough at the start.

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