Originally Posted by
burnthesheep
Agreed. For Zwift I guess I lament they don't do a good job on their classifications. So I don't race. It isn't experience/skill/power combo based. I'm basically trying to build my point for Zwift moving to points based racing like USAC has instead of raw w/kg.
I'm kind of over the "it ain't possible, they cheat" mentality and on to "so what, just move to points instead".
Even for group rides that aren't races and choose to not do "everyone together" for listing 3/wkg........you get a bunch of anomalies of folks on the front doing 300w the whole time at 100kg.
I mean, local to me, you'd still be in pretty rare air doing 300w for a full hour. No matter how small/big you are.
I’m new to Zwift, but I do have a couple of observations from the racing I’ve done. It seems that everything is based on your 20’ power, but that power is irrelevant in most Zwift races. My 20’ power puts me solidly in the A’s, but I get my ass kicked in every race I do except TT’s and a race up Alpe du Zwift. They group you on 20’ power, but races are won and lost (or I get dropped or not) based on my 30” to 1’ power. All of the things I’m good at in cycling don’t help in Zwift racing and all of the things I’m bad at are really important. :-).
I’m no longer a spring chicken, but I can still do a P/1/2 crit and not worry about getting dropped and even maybe play briefly at the front. In a Cat A race on Zwift I get popped out the back. I think I’m still kind of figuring things out and the game is similar, but not exactly like “real racing”. I think I can improve, but I’m probably going to get a kicking more often than not.
I think that you can do quite well on Zwift without having a crazy high FTP. Certainly you need some, but I would hesitate to jump to the conclusion that a rider who does well on Zwift necessarily has a big FTP. More likely they have a decent FTP and really good 1-5’ power.
Another thing is that the “pond” is I think much deeper on Zwift. When I go to Master’s nationals or worlds a lot of really good guys go, but also, a lot don’t for any number of reasons. Not every quality rider has the time, resources or family situation to travel to nationals or especially worlds. A lot more of those people do have the time/resources to get on Zwift. If there are 5 top level guys in your age group locally, maybe only 3 will go to nationals. But on Zwift imagine 3 of the top 5 in EVERY locality hopping onto the Zwift race you’re doing today. It’s going to be kind of hard!