Credit to my little brother who came up with the Dairy Queened term. About 6 months back I got disqualified from the C cat crit city races. Today I hopped on into a crit city race that had around 85 riders in it. The most I had raced was 30 riders… And I thought that was a lot. I was up for a challenge, and I even did a proper warm up with openers and all that stuff. In the first 5 minutes I was already a few bpm off of my max heart rate, and I was putting everything I had to keep up. On the 4th lap’s climb, I put on my power up to hang onto the group. I slowly got dropped so I pushed everything I had to catch back up. Then, the green cone of shame was next to my name. I got dairy queened… In those 10 minutes I had averaged around 5 wpk, which was about 1 wpk above the category limit, but I was barely hanging onto the group.
So was it a fair call by Zwift? Based off of their purely based wpk system, it was a fair call. But if you consider the fact that I am around 1/2 the weight of most of the riders, maybe even 1/3 the weight, it is an unfair call as I have to produce more wpk to keep up since 90% of the front group riders were pushing 300+ watts.
What do you think about this call? Was it fair? Let me know in the comments below.