The past two weekends I’ve done two crits and in both I’ve focused on "racing stupid." To race stupid means to do lots of work, to get into every break you can, and chase down any you can’t. It means burning every match you’ve got, lighting it up early and often. Unfortunately, for me at least, it also means a fairly anonymous finish, having nothing left to contest the finale.
However, the point of this post is not to make excuses for poor performance, but to give a quick visual showing how one can tell if tactics not training might be a problem — in other words, are you racing stupid and not knowing it? Below you see the cadence distribution from the Cat 3 race I did last Saturday. Notice how little time was spent coasting (less than 4%, less than 2 minutes out of the 45 or so the race lasted). If you see this same pattern in your race files (be sure to look at the race alone, not any warm up or cool down), you need to start thinking about how you can conserve energy better during the race.
For a more substantial discussion, see Allen and Coggan’s book Training and Racing with a Power Meter.
