Road Racing

[CaptainSlow]

Does anyone race?

Looking the the British Cycling website it seems that a beginner starts as a Cat 4 rider, no Cat 5?

What sort of standard is a Cat 4 race? What sort of time would they be doing say 80km in with say 1,000m of elevation?

[itsnotarace]

Due to the fact that road racing necessarily means a closed road (unless you are talking about TT's) you will find the majority of amateur racing takes place on closed circuits like Hillingdon http://hillingdoncyclecircuit.org.uk/ or Castle Combe or Goodwood and such like which are generally flat courses with no mega hills. Average speeds would be 24mph+ to stay in the bunch, more if you want to win.

[anonymous-user]

rather than outright pace, you need experience of riding at speed in groups, this means holding your line on a corner at 30mph and following the guy in fronts wheel to the inch with someone on your left and someone on your right, think of the red arrows performing a formation roll and you are about there....
hence why i like TTs, duathlons, mtb enduros, pretty much everything involving a cycle other than road racing!

Racing involves seemingly random accelerations throughout the race as people break, test each other etc etc, at the back these will come and go without warning but will break your legs pretty quickly.

Cat 4 varies wildly to be honest, your best bet would be to find a closed circuit series/race and watch a few races whilst going on a few local club rides. To answer your question though, Cat 4 races are usually about 25mph average with the ocassional foray over 30...

[okgo]

CaptainSlow said:

Does anyone race?

Looking the the British Cycling website it seems that a beginner starts as a Cat 4 rider, no Cat 5?

What sort of standard is a Cat 4 race? What sort of time would they be doing say 80km in with say 1,000m of elevation?

Start as cat 4, yep.

If you can find a road race that is open to 4th cats (there are a fair few, but they are not as frequent as 2/3 / e123 races) then you'll likely be racing with 3rd cats and also 2nd cats as there are almost no 4th only road races.

This was a 3/4 road race I did earlier in the year http://app.strava.com/activities/7165901 - pretty flat as you can see, but for a more rolling race expect average speeds down below 25 mph.

For circuits like Hillingdon etc the speed will be 25-27 average most of the time, but as said above forget about average speed, its meaningless (apart from bragging down the pub) in racing really.