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Racing
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My racing score is 802.

I normally race in the mornings. Post racing score implementation, there are now virtually no racing options…

Monday: one decent race between 0200 and 0800 at 0605
Tuesday: no races between 0300 and 0800
Wednesday: one borderline viable race between 0200 and 0800 at 0705
Thursday: no races between 0200 and 0800 UTC (apart from TTTs)
Friday: no races between 0200 and 0800

If this continues the A category riders are just going to give up and disappear, creating the opposite effect to what was intended.

It’s surely be better to have smaller, more regular races and keep this end of the community alive (even just 5 people can be a decent battle).

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Yeah, there are a few related posts on this topic. They had good intentions when segmenting advanced riders into their own category and trying to get critical mass of these riders by reducing the number of races on the calendar… But it seems like it really doesn’t work for certain time zones, and they took too many advanced times off the calendar with no real options for certain folks when they can ride depending on which hours they are available etc…

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Glad it’s not just me.
Just some mass start races would do the job.

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Yeah, I personally wouldn’t mind mass start races (though I’m not an advanced racer myself, wish I was! :)).

Here are a couple of related threads:
https://forums.zwift.com/t/zrs-advanced-incentivizes-sandbagging
https://forums.zwift.com/t/advanced-z-races/

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And there’s no longer anybody engaging with the community on these forums related to their supplied content (aside from the press release posts, where they post and then leave).

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For sure… would be nice for them to acknowledge they’ve heard this feedback and are investigating changes to the schedule.

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Same problem here, I’ve complained about this several times but it’s just crickets from Zwift HQ. For now I’ve been treating TdZ rides as mock races but those will evaporate soon.

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Delete your account and make more 20kg heavier. This should drop you down to 500 score, now you have someone to race with.

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9

I’ve been doing exactly the same - they’re good fun at the front.
But like you I’m anxious that there will be no racing action from next week onwards.

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There’s also this:

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Folks looking for additional racing opportunities might want to check out Flamme Rouge Racing which has a 9 stage tour starting February 20th.

And also the Chasing Tour is running almost a year’s worth of racing starting in March.

https://flammerougeracing.co.uk/
https://www.ecro.app/

Edit: These are racing series that do not appear on the public calendar and the companion app. So you do have to register for them on the sites above in order to get a race pass to participate in them. I also believe both use Zwift Racing App (at least in part) for categorization. One thing to note is that they tend to be longer than the average Zwift race. So if you’re looking for something where you can warm up, race, and cool down in less than an hour or so, these may not work well.

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These are good options but again only 4 slots per day, and the schedule is mapped to the WT so it’s not consistent.

I think people really just want the 3R races back where there was a consistent race you could enter every hour.

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Thanks for these links.
Flamme Rouge is 6am for me, which is just about plausible - and I do love a long race.
Hopefully there are reasonable numbers.

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Such a grim prospect after all the training it took to get the top category.

But I might do that over the summer.

I was thinking about telling my power meter I’m on 100mm cranks. Then I could use the my dual recording source for Strava / Intervals.icu

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I highly recommend joining the FRR discord channel. You can ask questions there and get a sense of what the top end competition is like at different times a day by asking around.

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I took a quick look back at the last FRR tour (Tour of Watopia) and it looks like there we around 12 to 19 people in the A pens at that 6:00 UTC time. You can take a look a participation numbers at various times at the link below.

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That’s great - thanks for looking that up. 12-19 is an optimal number for a race I think.
I’m on the Discord (and am fairly used to races like this from a previous ZRL season).

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The big onboarding difference for this series is that everyone has to do an iTT classification race (which also counts as Stage 1) in order to participate in the remaining events. This mandatory race is available on February 15, 16, 17 and 20th. So be sure to participate in one of those dates. They use your time from the iTT plus your Zwift Racing App level to assign categories. The results of the iTT also factor into the time for GC standings. (This keeps people from intentionally taking it easy on it.)

Happy racing!

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That is good to know. I’ve stuck it in my diary.
Can’t say I’m relishing the thought of a 38km ITT though!

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That’s rather frustrating. I hate to say it, but although they’re small fields and it might be a bit easy, I could at least get a race in on Rouvy in the mornings.

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