fruit thief wrote:
I am new to Zwift this year and have done about 20 races as a B. My FTP is just over 4.0W per kilo (says Zwift) 275W at 68kg. And usually I am finishing in the bottom half of the field.
Usually a race goes like this:
5 minutes in the red zone 4.5+ w/kg to hang with the 1st group
Pace settles down to 3.5-4 w/kg for 5 minutes, this feels ok.
Wait- a hill, people start popping out 6+w/kg, I'm off the back before I know it. And there's no coming back.
Get caught by the second group but I'm dead from the 1st 5 minutes of effort & when people start playing the hill game get dropped by this group too.
Finish with 3rd group, at first I was getting outsprinted but then I realised I needed to start upping the W with 1km to go and can usually stay away.
This is not a complaint, I find it enjoyable & good training.
When I look at the results later, the winners haven't usually produced more W/kg than me. Maybe they are bigger guys who produced more W overall, and that favoured them? Or maybe they were smarter with their really big efforts and didn't let a break get away.
I can't speak for the winners, but it sounds like you need better strategy and better training.
For the former, there's no reason why you should be doing close to 4.5 w/kg for five minutes (at least on courses with flat starts). The first minute should be decently hard, sometimes 5 w/kg for 90 seconds, other times 6 w/kg for a minute, but once you are inside the bunch, you can take things a bit more tranquillo at ~3.5 w/kg. Overall, the average for the first five minutes should be around 3.7-3.8 w/kg for someone at your mass (I'm quite comparable currently, probably FTP of 280 W at 69.5-70 kg). Don't hold back in the first 60-90 seconds, and when you are in, do all you could to conserve. If you are doing 4.5 w/kg, you've let the chase for joining the front group go on for too long.
For the latter, if a single 4.5 w/kg bout for 5 minutes is enough to see you get dropped, you aren't doing the right type of training needed for road racing (which is about 3-8 minute efforts, recovering from those efforts, and putting in another effort of that duration. From your post, it sounds like you aren't recovering at all, such that you are one-and-done. Then again, if you are a triathlete, you may not want to do a roadie's training. But if you want to do well in Zwift, those types of efforts will be needed.
The only time I needed to average over 4 w/kg for the first 10 minutes was a B-race with some 150+ sign ups and a lot of 80 kg+ types. They just drove it on the front, so that I needed to maintain ~95% FTP just to stay in the pack. Brutal.
The real grumble is that no real road race work this way, in the sense that those drafting really only needs to do ~70% of what those pulling are doing. On Zwift, one has to do ~80-85%. So still some drafting benefits, but greatly reduced and not nearly enough to allow one to recover.