On the 25th of July, @djeno rides the Alpe d'Huez. Not in a race number, and not in a peloton: on his own, up the twenty-one hairpins that finish the Tour's stage 20, because months ago he put that climb on his calendar as an A-goal and has aimed everything since at it.
That is the part that made me want to write this one. Most of us would sign up for a bucket-list mountain and hope the legs showed up on the day. Djeno did the opposite. He took the most famous climb in cycling, gave it a date, and then worked backward from it: a spring of structured threshold and sweet-spot riding in Flanders, almost all of it indoors, all of it pointed at roughly 13 kilometers of switchbacks he will not see until race morning.
The ride that mattered
The session that anchors the whole block came three weeks out. On the 4th of July he sat on the bike for four and a half hours and put up 240 TSS in a single ride, "Sweet Spot Blokken," his biggest day of the year. That is not a heroic one-off. It is the logical last big rehearsal before a taper: the coach handed him the volume, he held the power steady deep into the fourth hour, and the analysis came back reading "excellent." You do not fake a 4.5-hour sweet-spot ride. You build up to being able to absorb one.
The shape of the build
His plan runs on a Pyramidal model: a broad threshold and endurance base with the sharp stuff layered on top. His own instruction to the coach was simple, "improve my sweet spot and VO2max," and the spring did exactly that, a threshold block in May that pushed his Training Score to 71, then a steady diet of tempo and sweet-spot work carrying into July.
What stands out underneath it is the restraint. His load-management score has read 95 every single week since April, without one exception. This is a rider who lets the plan referee the intensity instead of his ego, on a stimulus, VO2max climbing, that tempts everyone to overcook it. The coach adapted his schedule 23 times across the block, every adaptation a good call by the numbers, and he runs it on full auto: he trusts it to move the sessions and gets out of its way.
What the score noticed
The Overload column tells the sharpening story of the final weeks:
| Week | Total | Overload |
|---|---|---|
| 14 Jun | 53 | 36 |
| 21 Jun | 59 | 73 |
| 28 Jun | 54 | 53 |
| 5 Jul | 58 | 79 |
Overload climbs from 36 back up to 79 as the plan reloads him for the mountain, while load-management holds the whole thing in check. The score is not prescribing that ramp. It is reporting a rider tuning up for one specific day.
The moment ahead
Seventeen days out, he is into the taper now: less volume, the intensity kept sharp. Ahead of him is the climb itself, the long drag out of Bourg d'Oisans and then the twenty-one numbered bends, an hour or so of sustained effort that a winter of indoor threshold work exists to make survivable. The whole spring was a bet that you can meet a legendary mountain on your own terms if you prepare like you mean it. On the 25th he gets to collect.
You can follow @djeno at intervalcoach.app/p/djeno. If you want to see your own training this way, your Analytics page carries the same Training Score and history. And if you would like to be featured here, set your profile public in settings and pick a handle.