Fortunately around here most of the races do have a separate cat 4 field and the 1,2,3 field is growing at a rate that someday we may actually see a 3 - would be very cool. This race is just a little different. The hard/long/climbing races historically seem to attract far fewer women of any category (43 total were pre-registered, and probably only a few did day of race) so often the fields are completely combined. Even though I know that I can't keep up with the 1,2's, I still intend to upgrade this year. The 4's fields can be a bit too squirrley and I would prefer the challenge of being off the back of the higher fields to being a consistant high finisher in the lower one.