Originally Posted by carpediemracing

mike is right, I'm a 3. The only year I was a 2 was 2011, after my very good 2010 year. I've raced every season since 1983 and I only ever got the points to upgrade to Cat 2 in 2010.

I upgraded in late Aug 2010 mainly because I thought we'd have a kid at some point in 2011 so I had to take the opportunity to upgrade to 2, even if I downgraded virtually immediately (I ended up downgrading prior to the 2012 season). I was strongest in 2010, racing as a 3, with maybe 450 total hours of training. That year I did 150 hours prior to March including two training trips, 200 most of season including another training trip, 100 to the end of the year including another training trip, very rough numbers I pulled out of my head although I definitely did 4 training trips (5-7 days except SoCal was 12 or 14 days). In 2011 I was totally focused on becoming a dad so I purposely set myself no goals. This led to a real haphazard season with basically no results, and we only found out we were expecting in August. In 2012 I became a dad so I did a similar season to this year but with probably less training - looking after a newborn is extremely exhausting. In 2013 I started training again - a 1 year old is easier to deal with, sleeps through the night, etc.

If I did 2-3 hours more a week in May, June, July I think that it'd have made a huge difference. That's 8-12 hours a month, so basically 50-100% more than what I did.

One of the reasons I put everything on Strava is to show new/current racers that you don't need to train crazy hours to be a crit racer. I have a low FTP (210-220w), I don't train much, but I can get some places and even win a field sprint. To the riders that have FTPs 50% higher than me I say, wow, if I had a 300w FTP I'd be an ultra competitive Cat 2 or I'd be really doing some serious damage in the M40+ or M45+ races. For flatter races it's about knowing how to race and much, much, much less about 2x20s or whatever training racers do.

Climbing and TTs are different but then you're dealing with w/kg above all else. If you don't have the watts or you can't drop to a reasonable kg then you can't race hilly races, period. Doesn't matter what you do, if you don't have that w/kg then you're done. For TT it's the same - if you lack the watts (FTP or, for shorter events, your 5 min power or whatever) you can't TT. You can improve but doing 48 kph for an hour is simply out of the question.

Climbing and TTs are like running. If you've never come close to running a 4 minute mile you're probably not going to. If you got close then the training etc may get you there, but if your fastest mile is a 6:30 then you have to accept that you're never going to do a 4:00.

Crits... that's like chess. It's not about how fit you are but how you apply your strengths tactically. Well for Cat 3s and below. For Cat 2s and such you need FTP, peak power, everything.