Originally Posted by cyclinganomaly

This is my 6th year of racing, and I have the same problem. I see the lines to move up through the pack, my nervousness gets the best of me and I rarely do it. As a cat.4 it was manageable, but now as a cat.3, it's killing me, can't even finish in the top half.
I asked this same thing of my first coach a couple of years ago, and he did have a drill for this. He lined up 3 guys going down the road, and you then had to get through or around them somehow. Going around the outside in the middle of the road wasn't permitted, but you could go around the outside on the edge of the road if the opportunity presented itself. The idea was to make a gap and go through the middle. I think we only did it twice for about 5 minutes each. His philosophy was if he showed you, and you did it once, that you are now an expert, and we don't need to do that drill anymore. I did it, but it didn't sink in. I figure that if I could get a few guys together and do this for an afternoon that it would help greatly, to just do it until it becomes second nature. Unfortunately, I live in a place where asking to do anything like this is considered sacrilege, and asking about it will get you the "don't be so serious" speech. If you can get a couple of friends to do this with you, I think this is the quickest and easiest solution to give you the base skills to move around in the pack to where you want to be.