I want to go for my first real road race soon, as I feel I progressed a lot since I started training seriously. I know there are a lot of things to focus on in a race, but I want to figure out what my strengths are from my power numbers.
I want to use Zwift races as a playing ground to experiment, because right now, I’m just sitting in the bunch, draft as much as possible and go for a sprint in the end. Everyone just goes by me in the final sprint and I feel like this isn’t the correct strategy for me.
I honestly don’t know when to attack, because I can’t make out my strengths from my power profile. Could anyone point me in a direction, what my biggest strengths are and how to utilize them in a race scenario?
My weight is around 73kg.
Your power profile is very similar to mine, save a few watts here and there. WKO5 says my strengths are my longer duration and my limiters my shorter powers, especially <1 min. I don’t race but on the road I notice people trying to overtake me, escape for a while but after a few minutes they blow up and I pass them again (after which I can speed up and hear them panting behind me and then give up)
Your 5s sprint is nothing special, but your 30s power looks quite good, although most charts compare 5s, 60s, 5m and 20m power. Have you tried opening your sprint early i.e doing a long sprint?
Is that on Zwift? It won’t work like that in real life, because in Zwift you just ride through people.
Honestly you need some real outdoors practice events. Either something like a small local crit series, or a group ride where attacking and sprints are part of it. Then try out different strategies to see what works, and when.
If you have never raced before you do not have any strengths. I don’t want to say it’s completely meaningless but your power profile is not very useful in your first few (dozen) races. Go look on youtube at all the Cat 4/5 guys with 1600W sprints that get completely smoked because they can’t corner and/or are out of position when the sprint comes.
I have to second this. I was one that had decent power numbers (1500W sprint, 375W 5’) however after entering a few crits it bacame more than apparent to me that my racecraft wasnt where it needed to be and I wasn’tdestined to do crits. (Insert Beverly Hillbillies song parody ‘TTs is the place you need to be’ here).
Jump into as many races as you can and learn. As I tell my 6yr old grandson when we are racing… you can observe a lot by just being there and watching.
Pretty good anaerobic power, and decent long/aerobic power. Probably sit in and conserve watts until a last lap flier could work for you. This is kind of the classic “all-rounder” profile. Your sprint is OK if you can reproduce that at the end of a race. Lots of people can do bigger watts than you when they’re fresh, but I see a lot of 1400W sprinters that can’t get over 1000W at the end of a crit. So if you’re racing intelligently to where you can use those 30s/1min watts and still sprint close to your max, no reason you can’t have success late race.
That said, I’d hit some offseason weights and train VO2max if I were you.