Good East-Coast US morning, everyone. A few points in response.
First, I really appreciate everyone’s input. You’ve all been really honest yet encouraging, and I’ve read everyone’s responses, carefully.
I’ve already done a half-dozen Tuesday Night Practice crits Crit and they’re useful for practicing handling and pack dynamics, but only for the neutral laps, at the beginning. Getting a feel for going three- or four-wide into a corner while basically touching elbows was a crazy experience, and I wish I could have more practice with it. Unfortunately, the Cat 3/2/1 guys use the Cat 5/4 race as a warm-up, so after the neutral laps, the fast guys are gone, the 5/4’s make a doomed attempt to chase, and the pack immediately strings out into smaller sub-packs, all going wildly varying speeds. You have fast Juniors, slow juniors, families just trying to stick together, groups of femmes, people just solo’ing it, and every now and then the 3/2/1 guys go whipping by. It’s chaos, and I don’t think it accurately represented a “real” Cat 5 race.
@Abe_Froman 's response “feels” like it most closely applies to me – that I’m not quite there yet and simply need a slightly higher W/Kg and/or better 1 to 5 minute power, just to hang on.
I’ve looked back at my previous attempts on Strava, and have tried to see what lessons I can learn from them. I think the easy-to-spot lessons are that a) I need to be able to hit hard at the race start then recover, quickly, and b) be able to throw out 1+ minute hard efforts to cover attacks.
But … part of me wants to give it another go, to see if my much-improved health has changed things up. I have zero illusions about winning, but even being able to hang with the pack and not get dropped in early laps would be hugely satisfying, I think.
And yet … I’ve been watching youtube vids of cat 5/4 racers doing courses that I’ve raced, before, watching their numbers, then checking that race on Strava. Most of them seem to be putting out average power in excess of 250W (for 50 minutes) and 1m power of around 500W, and I can’t hit either of those benchmarks. Granted, the dudes I’m watching seem to be using their power to make up for pretty sloppy positioning – watching some of the footage had me saying “why are you all over the place, man? just get right on that dude’s wheel and stay there until you need to make a move”.
It really comes down to the fact that getting spat out the back on lap 1 or 2 is 100% not-fun, and I don’t want to experience that. I just don’t know if I have the fitness to even hang on, yet.
Thanks, again, for all the replies and discussion. I’m following the thread, closely, and taking everyone’s responses into consideration!
There’s a lot more to it than W/kg, especially in flat races and 4 corner crits. Raw watts matter quite a bit more.
FWIW, I have four Cat 4 clients now. All of them came to me as guys who would get dropped from Cat 4 4/5 fields here in SoCal, and now they’re competitive (i.e. top 10s, no issues staying with the field, actually racing). Here’s where they raced last season in terms of FTP to get there:
3.5W/kg
3.3W/kg
3.06W/kg
3.66W/kg
The top three guys with the lower W/kg all have FTPs above 260 (the top guy is now 315 and 3.9). The last guy is 225W, and he struggles to stay with the fields more than the others because he just doesn’t have the raw power, he’s just a smaller guy. If he tries to attack, he’s probably getting dropped on the back end. If he sits in and conserves, he does fine and can finish top 10 in large fields with a good sprint.
I think there’s a whole lot of it depends in here because in Cat 4/5 you have some guys coming over from other sports (triathletes!) some of whom are just passing through, and then you have true endurance sports novices. To wit, I was 4-4.3W/kg (290-305) as a 4, probably 3.8 (275) or so as a 5, but didn’t know a damn thing about crit racing. In both cases I could ride off the front with a few min to go (my 1 and 5min W/kg are strengths) and win assuming I didn’t do dumb stuff earlier in the race.
Also depends on where you race. A SoCal Cat 4/5 field is stronger in my experience than where I raced my 5 season.
I would say you probably have some work to do. That said, I’d encourage you to jump in a field and find out. 230 is enough to stay with a field here if you’re smart about it, conserve, and don’t try to cover things yourself. That said, you’ll probably have a tough time matching accelerations right now. nothing wrong with that, we all start somewhere!
230 to 260 or 270, if you have had health problems in the past, isnt a massive jump. That’s doable by mid summer, and would be more than enough to hang IMO.
I’m in that watt/kg range as well. The lst few years I’ve been about 84 kg, 275-290 ftp.
I kind of suck at crits and am happy to finish in the front half (my racecraft sucks). But honestly I do feel like my fitness is enough to contest the front if I had the skill.
I’m consistently top 10 every cross race though, where my skill is definitely not a limiter.
Not going to add any more on the watts or skills side of things as it’s been well covered above. It’s worth mentioning position and equipment as well, you want to at least make sure you’ve not left any low handing fruit there. I.e. You don’t need a top of the range aero bike and a custom fitted skinsuit. But at minimum you do want a good aero position on the bike, fast rolling tyres and latex tubes (or tubeless), ideally some fairly deep race wheels, and snug fitting kit, and all those apart from the wheels can be had relatively inexpensively and will save a lot of watts compared to a bad setup.
Not winning 3/4s in the UK on 4.2 w/kg is real. It’s fast over here, maybe as fast as NorCal (lived there too). There are more racers in any given field here, but teams seem to be less a thing, and especially in 3/4, races tend to be attritional, rather than tactical.
Also, just to make it clear, cat 4 here is more like cat 4/5 combined in the US. Cat 3 points are harder to get in the UK, assuming you race the same amount. In the UK you lose your accumulated points every year, and your fall back down a category if you don’t maintain enough points, so you’ll have people who would be 2s in the US, but in the UK, they’ve become 3s again, or guys like me (he said humbly) who should be 2s, but can’t get enough races in to upgrade. All that means that 3/4 races here are stout.
Glad you concur @Jesse_Vernon1, that’s exactly my experience of it here in the North West of the UK - and that I wasn’t just being soft or have an iffy over reading power meter
Racing isn’t all about w/kg as you understand. It’s about the proper application of those watts in the proper place that maters. That said, I don’t have a killer sprint - around 800w at the end of the race (10wpkg+), but I can ride at FTP or above for an extended period when racing and can recover pretty well in that type of effort. Just my personal physiology. FWIW NP after every race was always 10-15w above my FTP so there is that I suppose. And, grading is just for where I live. If I drove 2-3 hrs south i’d probably be a 4/5 so it’s all relative. I think old mate just needs to get out there and let the watts sort themselves out and not attach any attention to w/kg or anything like that. Just get in and race and see if he has fun doing it. Cause that’s what its all about.
