[MENTION=23431]celticfrost[/MENTION], you could just race flat TTs. Then weight really doesn't matter that much...

[MENTION=71001]Hermes[/MENTION], interesting comments on "raw power". People sometimes forget or fail to realize that it does take a minimum amount of power to do certain things on the bike. For example, there are some guys I ride with and on the road I can easily drop them on a climb- I obviously have a better power-to-weight ratio than they do and better endurance. But if things get steep enough on the mountain bike, suddenly I'm walking while they're still pedaling. This was confusing to me but then I came to understand that if you can't generate the minimum power necessary to climb that hill, you're just out of luck, being lighter does not help you. Ditto with the separation thing in a group ride. People want to believe its all proportional, smaller people generate less power but they need less, right? Not entirely- when you have lower absolute power and you're riding on flat ground in the draft, your weight is no longer much of an advantage. So you can get away with riding with faster, stronger people if you're crafty about the group riding tactics. But you still get dropped if you don't have the absolute raw power to make the minimum needed to hang when you hit a headwind or a slight uphill grade. Yeah the answer is to train for better power output, but the rate at which you can build muscle may be lower if the reason that you're smaller is because you're a woman and lacking in testosterone relative to men. Sure women can do it. But not all women and it may take way longer than it would for a man and at some point it maybe just becomes more practical to ride in a different way (ie recreationally). So obvious to me that this is what happens with many women in the world of cycling and so interesting how many men just refuse to see this. They think because they used to be dropped when they first started riding that its just a newby thing, its not genuinely more difficult for women. The really curious thing is how invested some people are in the concept that cycling is a meritocracy- if women are slower or can't hang, the issue is that they're not working hard enough or haven't been training long enough or don't have the group riding skills. Sure, some of those things account for it- but there's an important physiologic difference which is just really hard to understand unless you're living it.


But I totally agree that being lighter is better in so many ways. Not that losing weight is easy but its such a huge bang for the buck in cycling that its ridiculous. Its almost cheating how much you get for relatively little effort compared to training.