Saturday, May 9. A gravel road in Colorado. Hour three of a four-hour ride. The temperature has climbed past 31°C. The plan called for two hours. She is on the bike for four, and the three-minute intervals at the end of the third hour are landing at the same power as the ones at the start.
That is not a coincidence. That is the seventh hour of @falsesummit's race on June 13, walked back through training. Pikes Peak APEX Day 1: 135 miles of gravel with Pikes Peak sitting in the middle. She lives in Colorado. The mountain is not a postcard.
The handle is the joke and the warning. Anyone who has climbed a Colorado mountain knows the trick: the summit you can see from the road is almost never the top. The ridge crests, you breathe out, and there is another ridge. To name yourself after the trap is to refuse it.
The plan said two hours
The training plan for May 9 was the standard build-phase top-end session: VO2max intervals, around two hours, 193 TSS. She rode 341. The notable thing is not the volume. It is what was happening at hour three: repeated three-minute efforts in Z5 and Z6, on gravel, late into a ride where most riders would have already finished. The post-workout analysis read it back to her directly. "The ability to produce power under significant fatigue is exactly what you will need for the later stages of the Pikes Peak APEX."
The week before, the same pattern in a different shape. Saturday, an over-under session on the gravel bike with 798 metres of climbing. Sunday, a 3.5-hour threshold ride with 1,089 metres of climbing. Three serious climbing days inside eight calendar days, on the actual surface and the actual gradient. By the time June 13 arrives, none of the terrain on the course will be new.
The pile underneath
The May rides do not happen without the March and April rides under them. The training log for the first two months of the build is quiet on purpose: short Z2 endurance in the morning before work, weekend rides in the foothills that ended before lunch, two strength sessions a week. No single day looks like much. They stack. CTL climbed from the high seventies into the high eighties without a single week feeling heroic.
That is the whole point of Block periodization. Hammer one quality at a time. Rotate. Skip the temptation to do everything at once. She skipped it.
What the score reads
Four Sundays in a row:
| Date | Total | Overload |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-04-26 | 71 | 81 |
| 2026-05-03 | 73 | 78 |
| 2026-05-10 | 70 | 63 |
| 2026-05-12 | 76 | 100 |
Overload at the ceiling, the same week as her hardest ride of the year. Not the score telling her to train harder. The score noticing, after the fact, that she already did.
June 13
The taper starts now. Shorter sessions, sharper, openers, the start line. The race itself does not get easier because the spring was good. The middle of Pikes Peak APEX is the same 135 miles for everyone, the same mountain, the same false summits. What is different is who is riding.
The version of @falsesummit who started this block in February could not have done the May 9 ride. The one who starts on June 13 will have done it twice.
Follow @falsesummit
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Good luck on June 13, FalseSummit. Race the build you trained for.