Hmmm my peak 5s is at 90 rpm, which is normally a little lower than my average cadence.

Maybe I should work on spinning and sprinting...

The races are just as deep in my area-that is the ones worth doing all average around 80-100 in a cat 3 field. Some races even fill up two cat 3 fields with 100 in a field e.g.Battenkill.
I put out nearly 5w/kg, so my FTP does not hold me back, my positioning in the field does and learning to read races, a combination of this along with racing against teams and me racing solo means I am at a disadvantage, but I have faith that if I continue to train hard and race often, that I will get smarter, stronger all around and be more conservative. I have also found that the 3's are in general a different league, it has to be a real long climb for my climbing abilities to come into play, a lot of the strong guys can just power over an 8 minute climb and then drop the hammer again.

I am sure you will make it to a two in a short time though.

By deep I mean the number of people that are "competitive", not the total field. However, I think areas with large cycling populations would all be fairly comparable, and I think the depth of the fields would also increase at higher categories. I.e. a 4's race in podunk, nowheresville might have a handful really strong guys but in NY, TX, CO, or CA may have 20 really strong guys. But by the time you get to the P/1/2 level I think that the level of competition is going to be pretty consistent nationally.

The northeast has a deep talent pool as well.

Not going to disagree with you so much as ask 'how do you know'?

Because I've seen some of the early spring races and seen how fast they are and how hard the guys are out there racing.

There are lot of good teams in the Boston, NYC, and Philly areas.

I've had a hard time not coming off the wrong way recently, but just to be clear you are unfamiliar with the races in other parts of the country (just as I am unfamiliar with anything but CA, and almost exclusively norcal)

Some potentially useful links I have found whilst reading up on power:

From Freil’s Blog:

http://www2.trainingbible.com/joesblog/2009/03/wko-q.html

TSB = Training Stress Balance. This is often referred to as 'form.' It has to do with the athlete being rested before a race (or not). It may also help us to understand when the athlete is moving toward overtraining as a result of overreaching, which is necessary to achieve high goals. When well rested TSB is positive or at least trending strongly positive. When not 'on form' TSB is very negative and/or trending strongly negative.

CTL = Chronic Training Load. Referred to as 'fitness,' this is a marker of one's training stress over a long period of time, such as 6 weeks. The higher the CTL the higher the athlete's fitness. It indicates that the athlete can handle higher stress levels. Stress (workouts) are the reason we train as it produces adaptation which we call 'fitness.'

TSS = Training Stress Score. This is the heart of the system. The athlete's TSS is calculated for every workout by measuring intensity and duration. Intensity is measured relative to the athlete's Functional Threshold Power (FTP) which is the highest average power the athlete can maintain for 1 hour.

ATL = Acute Training Load. I call this 'fatigue.' It is the athlete's short term, rolling-average TSS. It is generally averaged over a 7-day period.

http://www.midweekclub.ca/powerFAQ.htm#Q1

http://www.midweekclub.ca/articles/coggan.pdf

isn't that all relative, i mean how fast they are?....of course the guys racing are racing hard...who doesn't? i would also say that the fields are much more steeped in talent here in Socal overall than they are in the northern regions, just much more of an ability to train year around, thus attracting more people to ride and race.

Take the average fitness of a guy in Socal in march and i bet he would do quite well against peeps in the northeast, i am sure that the guys up there are training hard...but they just have the oppurtunities that we do.

Here's a question on testing:
So when it's time to do a test do you do all out tests for 5 seconds, 1 min, 5 min, etc? I would assume that doing tests this way would be like creating falsified data. For example, all of us can do a 1 min test much harder when we know our ride is done after that one minute. However I would think that the 1 minute test would be more telling of your abilities if it was done during the course of a race paced effort.

Anyone have examples of how they run their tests?

The idea is to find your physiological (and to some extent psychological) limit. Then it's reproducible, and you can track improvements and compare your profile to other profiles.

I test when I'm fresh and testing is my first goal for the ride. I test early in the ride, or I take it really easy until I get to the test site (but get an appropriate warmup).

So I tried the Hunter and Coggan testing protocol where you test 1min 5min 30sec and 20min power all at once and it did not work so well for me. The 1 and 5 min powers were fine, but I just cant get good sub 1 min power going on a trainer. As for the 20min power I just gave up after 3min as I could not come close to my target wattage for the first 5 minutes.

I am getting a lot of good data from race files so I am using that. Except for 5sec power where I produce best when I am fresh.

Yeah I understand the idea of tracking what you are physically capable of (like max bench for example)....I just don't think that is being a true indicator of your power except in the circumstances that you aren't racing before having to do a 1 minute power output. Can you still do 822w for 1 min WR at the end of a long hard race? I would expect you'd be lower than what you can do if you are just doing a 1 minute test. See what I'm saying? How often are you just doing 1 minute (other than in a kilo) and not having a fatigue build up before hand?

I agree that it's not possible to duplicate these results in race conditions, but they aren't for the purpose of figuring out what you might do in a race.

The idea is to learn about your MAXIMAL profile, and associate that with race limiters. In my race experience, I thought I was a sprinter who couldn't catch a break. After I did power tests (and learned how to test 1' power), I realized that my sprint was pretty strong, but my 1' power was actually significant. Would have never learned that in a race.

This information allowed me to modify my training to focus on FTP (that's my weakness), and also caused me to modify my race strategy. The end result is that three months later, I was winning races -- some off of FTP gains that allowed me to be the sprinter in a break of time-trialists -- other wins were from that 1' attack.

I know it doesn't fit everyone's training or racing style, but actual, high-quality, maximal tests are necessary for me.

testing is harder than racing

but I don't win either one, so who am I to say

cool.

The good & strong guys and gals train through the winter.

I'm not saying that the talent pool isn't deep in socal. I'm just saying it's deep here as well. How deep? I have no means of comparison and neither do you.

Frankly, it doesn't matter to me. I just like to race my bike ;)

yeah...not really enjoying it much this year.

Are you going to race this weekend?

:(

I've been having moments where I don't feel like doing it but I still drag myself out there and end up enjoying a good training ride. And then there are days like today where I want to go out and I do go out and everything feels awesome.

I downloaded my ride for today, but I had a couple of stops in between. I forgot to merge the activities before I downloaded, now I have three separate activities. I deleted them from the CPU already, is there a way to merge the three of them even though they are already downloaded to poweragent?
Thanks.

Is there any way to change your threshold in WKO+ and not effectively change the ATL/CTL etc for past workouts?

Since I have a 'higher' FTP now, I'm taxing my system less at that level now, but the earlier workouts shouldn't change their TSS/TSB even with the higher FTP since that doesn't seem to make sense?

In the power training zones, click options > new zones, set the date that the new threshold takes effect

Thanks!