Originally Posted by
carpediemracing
Crits, if you're not soloing off the front, can be pretty easy from a physical load point of view. To average 15 mph takes maybe 180w, maybe a bit less, and I rarely go over 180w for a crit, I've seen over 200w average I think just once (and I couldn't sprint at the end of it). In the race below I think my average was 187w, something like that, and our average speed was decent, 25 or 26 mph.
Therefore if you can do 16 mph for two hours then you could probably do 2 Cat 5 races in a day and not feel as physically tired as you did after that 16 mph ride. Mentally it might be exhausting but physically not so much.
1) that tells me I need to get more efficient, or lighter. Not unusual for me to have average power around 280 for a crit of similar speed.
2) Average power doesn't tell the whole story. Yesterday's crit, I averaged 239 watts, which is below tempo for me, but I also was in the power interval zone for 21 efforts, which has its effect. Definitely more training load than a 2 hour ride at 200 watts or so.