Viewing 19 posts - 1 through 19 (of 19 total)
  • Races with a handicap applied to the fast guys? ie level playing field :-)
  • FunkyDunc
    Free Member

    I did the Colne Valley MTB Challenge Yesterday, and ended up quite far down the field.

    Overall I was about 1/3 slower than the winner. However on the thread on here, a couple of the fast guys have said they 3 or 4 times more miles per week than I have the ability to do. ie I can not afford the time out to ride a bike, so will never get that kind of mileage in.

    So in terms of miles trained to time slower, I was actually quicker than them :mrgreen:

    OK I know its not as straight forward as that, and any graph wouldnt be linear, but I am sure some clever bods must have worked out a way of correlating finish times v. effort training to work out who would actually have one the race if everyone had done the same amount of training… or is that just defeating the whole point of bike racing ??

    notmyrealname
    Free Member

    is that just defeating the whole point of bike racing ??

    This

    crikey
    Free Member

    a) You didn’t do a race.
    b) See above.
    c) If you did no training at all, where would you like to finish?

    Fresh Goods Friday 696: The Middling Edition

    Fresh Goods Friday 696: The Middlin...
    Latest Singletrack Videos

    Some road races are run as handicaps. And quite a lot of track leagues include handicap races.

    Being crap never seemed to give me much of an advantage in either 🙂

    aracer
    Free Member

    I suspect the fairest way to get what you’re after would be for everybody to give a blood sample before the start to be sent off for genetic analysis. Then you could all save the time you’d have wasted riding your bikes and go home to wait for the results.

    Buzzard
    Free Member

    The Transportugal does something like this. their handicap system is based on age and gendar and is predominantly aimed at keeping the field closer together over LONG days but it works well in terms of overall results. Some of the faster girls also the have the oppurtunity of hooking onto some of the faster men as they come past which means they are not alone all day.

    uselesshippy
    Free Member

    The old single speed rules worked.
    Get the fit boys to drink beer, that’ll slow them down.
    Or the backmarkers, me, just get pissed and have fun. 😀

    br
    Free Member

    However on the thread on here, a couple of the fast guys have said they 3 or 4 times more miles per week than I have the ability to do. ie I can not afford the time out to ride a bike, so will never get that kind of mileage in.

    It’s not you ‘can not afford’ the time, it’s that they’ve more commitment than you. When you’re sat watching the telly, they’re out putting in the miles.

    And age/gender handicap – how’s that going to work as when I did the Gorricks the Vets were normally the fastest class.

    Road time trials also have handicap prizes. Its some complicated formula based on riders previous best times over the distance.

    Obviously couldn’t be done on any ride incorporating bridleways 😉

    jimification
    Free Member

    I suspect the fairest way to get what you’re after would be for everybody to give a blood sample before the start to be sent off for genetic analysis. Then you could all save the time you’d have wasted riding your bikes and go home to wait for the results.

    I always wonder that with time triallists – why don’t you just compare your FTP’s?

    jimification
    Free Member

    I always get the impression that it’s a lot more fun for the guys at the front as (from XC race reports) – they seem to know who they’re racing against for most of the race. For us guys in the middle, we just do what we can and then see where we ended up at the finish.

    Sometimes, if the timing is working properly, you can get a shout: “you’re 1 minute behind the next guy” but you have no idea who that is or what he looks like, so maybe you overtook him already and didn’t know? maybe the guy behind you overtook you? Or maybe that was one of the “male pairs” guys, who are lapping faster anyway. You have no way of knowing….

    The races I enter all seem to be graded by age, rather than speed, which is mostly meaningless in MTB. If I enter Big Dog this year, for example, I’ll be on the start line racing against Rob Lee – You might as well put Tomac on the start line!…Mr Lee is going to have to have an awful lot of mechanicals before he and I are in competition!

    I think some categories (as MTB is in the US) would be good as then more of us would actually be competing rather than just riding around as fast as we can 😉

    DezB
    Free Member

    I no longer race (even when I entered I wouldn’t say I was a “racer”!) but they used to have these things called “categories”.
    Doesn’t that do the job?

    molgrips
    Free Member

    Categories in XC racing have been foobared by pot-hunters.

    Re the OP – being fast is NOT about how many miles you put in…. You can be pretty fast without having to spend that many hours.

    crikey
    Free Member

    Re the OP – being fast is NOT about how many miles you put in…. You can be pretty fast without having to spend that many hours.

    Hmmmm….

    You still have to put the work in though.

    (I understand what you mean molgrips, and this is not an attempt to contradict you.)

    muppetWrangler
    Free Member

    jimification Has pretty much summed up why I don’t regularly enter races.

    Every couple of years I’ll get the idea that it would be good to race and then I do and remember that it’s all a bit pointless as there are too many categories on the circuit at any one time.

    If it were a single category at a time then you would at least know who you were racing against. If you must have multiple categories together then coloured bibs (or helmet covers, armbands or whatever) would help but not being able to tell who you are racing against makes the whole exercise a bit dull.

    Shibboleth
    Free Member

    As Crikey mentioned, YOU DIDN’T DO A RACE!

    You did the Colne Valley CHALLENGE. It’s not a race. It’s like a sportive, but for mountain bikes.

    If you want to race, enter a race. They tend to be advertised as “races”, and you’ll effectively be racing against other riders rather than not racing, which is what happened at Colne Valley this weekend.

    But going back to your question, and notwithstanding the fact that you’re talking about an event that isn’t a race, no. Daft idea.

    The Categorised system works well, particularly in road racing, but it tends to be for the purposes of keeping the lazy numpties in 3rd/4th Cat races away from the dedicated riders who have earned the right to ride in E/1/2 races.

    A rider of your ability has no place on the leader board with the names of people that put in a lot more graft…

    molgrips
    Free Member

    You still have to put the work in though.

    Quite.. I know a bloke who rode something stupid like 7k miles in 5 months to train for a sportive and was still quite slow.

    londonerinoz
    Free Member

    A lot of mtb races use different coloured number boards for each category, or numbers in a certain series, usually everyone with the same first digit is in the same cat. There was even a couple where you also tied a coloured ribbon round your seat post which I thought was a brilliantly simple idea, and lightweight too!

    You can look around you at the start line remembering as many riders and bikes as you can, and once you’re racing regularly you can recognise, and gasp, maybe even get to know many of your rivals. Finally if you’re within the top 20 from the start you can often count how many riders are in front of you or make a good guess, and even if you’re not it’s often the case that wherever you’re placed you only swap places with a handful of riders during most of a race anyway.

    If you can get your fitness up and compete in the top 10 it is hugely satisfying when you’re able to race strategically. Oh but for those days again!

    molgrips
    Free Member

    it is hugely satisfying when you’re able to race strategically.

    Yeah, I did that ONCE, and I still remember it. I had a bloke on my rear wheel for a lap and a half.. the pressure was immense.. on one turn I faked a mistake and ran wide, letting him charge up the inside whereupon I latched onto his rear wheel. I passed him back later, then it was just me and him for ages.. I got used to him and didn’t realise we were about to finish and at the bottom of the last short climb he totally caught me napping and outsprinted me. Result – 11th! Argh!

Viewing 19 posts - 1 through 19 (of 19 total)

The topic ‘Races with a handicap applied to the fast guys? ie level playing field :-)’ is closed to new replies.

New deal added to Members Discounts