Road to Sky is by far my easiest cruise. It isn’t a particularly popular cruise, so the races are typically a mix of of just sandbaggers and legits. Further, the heavies only have a very small advantage there. They have the upper hand in the short approach and if they can make clever use of it, then they can get a head start in the climb that may be hard for a lighter rider to bridge without going over limits. But usually they don’t present the normal, often unsurmountable, problem for a cruiser on the lighter side of the scales. Finally, even a stronger cruiser, should you ever meet one on the Alpe, does not have much of an edge since the pace should be set as even as possible for efficiency – as long as you can stay at limit for the entire duration of the race, be it at 100 or 150 BPM, you are competitive. So essentially, when I cruise Road to Sky I expect to win. And I did, this time too.
The start was slow and the front group arrived at the climb a couple of Watts below my set limit average of 190W. Well, not quite the front group. There were three riders ahead, although within eyesight, who I was sure belonged to the sizeable group of sandbaggers that had signed up.
Once we hit the climb I just kept going at the same pace all the way until the finish. Like in the Lutscher CCW race two days earlier, this is a 1 hr+ race in the lower categories, meaning the legits simply can’t keep up. Somehow this course also seems to be way more demoralizing to many participants than the Lutscher. Which is kind of funny to me. Sure, it’s a little bit longer, but it’s way easier on the legs and the heart. You just keep going steady. TT style (unless you, quite unlikely, really need to drop someone). Piece of cake. And again a huge lead on the runner-up. Note that 14 riders got DQ’d or UPG’s, more than actually finished the race within cat limit. People always go too hard in the early climb. And those were just the ones registered on ZP… Like I said, you rarely face skilled cruisers on Road to Sky, playing the German board game known to us as Zwift racing. And the legits can’t last at 2.5 or 3.2 or whatever W/kg for a race that long. Hence the wide time margin. It has absolutely nothing to do about heroics or physical prowess. It’s just plain cheating, slipping into the blind spots of an idiotic race rule set that should have been reworked years ago.