It wasn't meant as a snub
we all start somewhere. The readings are obviously wrong!
Not obviously. Have a look across various Zwift forums/facebook groups and you'll soon find plenty of people with an FTP between 100-150W and sprints of 300W. Admittedly much of them are younger, older or otherwise physically limited. Without knowing situation, it's very hard to judge! I was trying to lighten the tone if it'd been taken slightly the wrong way by MM-Seat. Good to hear it hadn't!
It's just when someone who is approaching half my weight can hold an amount of watts for an hour that I had to sprint for, I knew something wasn't quite right. Tweaked the setup and rode fairly hard for 40 mins earlier and averaged a zpower of 172 watts which seems better.
Be very careful directly comparing yourself to other riders on Zwift, at least in 'open' riding anyway. During racing things should be a little more accurate, but it's still a complete minefield!
172W is a respectable starting point for someone fairly new to cycling. I'd expect that to rapidly increase to around 200W levels as you get into it, gain fitness & get used to riding the turbo. Enjoy the huge gains, they get harder and harder to attain! These days I'm just happy to see power figures around my expected FTP - I'm fairly sure when I eventually drag myself through a test to have it drop!
Ended up getting to 11miles though and I bailed. I was pretty tired and the trainer is below our bedroom and my wife had gone to bed as wasn’t feeling well and I was conscious of noise.
It’s probably the longest distance I’ve ridden so far so happy with that, especially with a lot of it seeming to be uphill. A bit disappointed I didn’t tough it out though.
EDIT - just checked and it was a track called Road to Ruins Hilly Race
Also one thing I noticed was that some D rated people were holding around 2.4w/kg for the whole race. Surely that suggests it’s the wrong class for them?
EDIT2 - Chilli is a terrible pre-workout meal. I feel like I’m gonna be sick!
Well done for your first race! Most Zwift races start the same - a sprint for the first mile or two. Things generally settle down afterwards.
https://www.zwiftpower.com/events.php?zid=49646
As you're new to racing the CAT assignment is totally down to you choosing what you think is correct at race start. On Zwift Companion app (previously Zwift Mobile Link app) when you click on an event you will see the different CATs listed as separate events below it (they kinda open as a list but you have to scroll). If joining from the Zwift program itself on PC from the startup screen you have to hover over the event (on the top right) and then click on one of the (usually) 4 CAT coloured buttons which pop up.
WBR races are generally administrated by a small team who will actually look at riders previous race results if their power/data/results look questionable (high!) for the entered CAT. All of these results are displayed and available through
www.zwiftpower.com which does require registration and agreement to their T&C's surrounding your data (GDPR!). Without registering and agreeing to terms most races (and admins) will DQ riders, regardless of their results.
Hope that helps & jump in some group training rides, you'll find them much more fun when starting out. Most racing is B & C, within the CAT D power 'band' you'll have quite a smaller field of riders and many times find yourself riding alone. The race you entered had only around 15 riders, 12 of which DQ/DNF so only 3 registered finishers on ZP. Yes, you could finish on a podium racing CAT D just by finishing!
The LIVE results (tab at the top) has you in 108th place (out of 152 starters), even though you're not listed as DNF. No ride data so it would imply your Strava profile is set as private, can see you've not setup a ZP account so therefore not agreed to the T&C's or linked to your Strava account. Much of the ZP requirements (surrounding power & HR) come from Strava data outputted from Zwift, not zwift itself.
