Three weeks from now, Carsten lines up for the MCV Klassikeren, a mountain-bike race in Denmark. His numbers are doing the thing every rider hopes for at the end of a build: still going up. His eFTP has climbed 14 watts in the last two weeks alone, and it is sitting at its highest point of the summer with the race in sight.
He is the first Danish athlete in this series, and the reason I picked him is not the size of the engine. It is how simple the recipe behind it looks. Carsten started with IntervalCoach in early June with a solid summer of riding in his legs. Ten weeks later the whole build reads like a demonstration that you do not need a menu of twenty exotic workouts to peak for a race. You need about two good ones, repeated, and the discipline to keep everything around them easy.
Two workouts
The intensity in his plan keeps returning to the same pair of sessions. One is a threshold day: two times twenty minutes at 95 to 100 percent of FTP, ridden at 92 rpm. The other is a VO2max day: eight times three minutes at 120 percent, at 100 rpm. His plan calls them "Tærskel Intervaller" because IntervalCoach coaches him in Danish, and he executes them with a repeatability that stands out in the files: the VO2max session he did in mid-June and the one he did a month later came back with identical numbers, 111 TSS at an intensity factor of 0.92, to the decimal.
Around those two days, almost everything is easy. He trains on a Polarized model, and the easy volume arrives in an unglamorous form: short gravel rides threaded through ordinary workdays, sometimes two or three of them in a day around the structured session. None of them look like training. All of them count.
The watts followed
When he arrived in June, his eFTP stood at 289 and his best 20-minute power at 291. Through the volume weeks of midsummer the number went flat and even dipped, 299 down to 294, which is what heavy legs look like and nothing to panic about. Then the Peak phase intensity landed, and the response was immediate: 294, 303, 308 across three weekly snapshots. His 20-minute power now stands at 318, up 27 watts from where the summer started. Even his ride home showed it; one recent commute stretch came back 34 watts harder than the identical ride two weeks earlier.
What the score noticed
| Week | Total | Fitness Base |
|---|---|---|
| Jun 14 | 57 | 53 |
| Jul 5 | 68 | 57 |
| Jul 26 | 64 | 72 |
| Aug 16 | 65 | 75 |
Fitness Base is the column to read: 53 to 75 in ten weeks, without a single step backward. That is the score watching an aerobic engine get bigger while the flashier numbers wobbled through the mid-July grind. As I write this his total sits at 72, with the base at 74 and load management at 95, which is a rider arriving at a taper in exactly the state a taper wants him in.
The plan runs in auto mode, and its adjustments have a pattern: when a hard day is scheduled for tomorrow, today gets swapped to endurance. Twelve adaptations so far, and nearly all of them landed well. The hard days stay hard because the days around them are protected.
Three weeks out
The finish of this build is already written. Next week brings the last big work, over-under intervals that criss-cross the threshold. The week after, one final sustained-threshold day, three times twelve minutes. Race week collapses to easy spins, one short VO2max sharpener four days out, and two full rest days before the start.
Watch what his eFTP does through those three quiet weeks. If the taper does its job, the number that has been climbing under load will hold, or nudge up, while the fatigue drains away. That is the snapshot I will be looking for after September 13.
You can see the same numbers for your own training on your Analytics page: your eFTP history, your power curve, the shape of your build. And if you would like to be featured in a future spotlight, reply to any IntervalCoach email and say so. The riders in this series are real, the numbers are theirs, and the work is the point.