On a Saturday in late August, François will roll out at Le Mans and try to keep pedalling until roughly the same time the next day. The 24h du Mans Vélo is the bicycle version of the famous endurance race: a circuit, a clock, and twenty-four hours of riding. He is sixty-eight days out, and the work already has a very specific shape.
What made me want to write this one is the kind of fitness the event demands. A 24-hour race does not reward a sharp peak. It rewards an engine that still makes clean power after the legs are tired, after the light goes, after the body has every reason to fade. You cannot fake that on race day. You build it, ride by ride, for months. François is in the middle of exactly that build, and his data reads like a thesis statement for it.
The one ride that explains the rest
Last Saturday's session is the whole idea in a single ride. Three hours and twenty-four minutes of aerobic endurance with high-intensity efforts stacked on top of the accumulated fatigue: 191 TSS, and one of the cleanest executions I have seen from him. The point of a ride like that is not the hours. It is the bursts that come after the hours, when you are already tired and have to hit the watts anyway. That is the precise demand of a 24-hour race, rehearsed in miniature on a Saturday morning in June.
It is not the only sharp tool in the box. A few days earlier he held 347 to 348 watts across repeated one-minute efforts in an anaerobic set, 85 TSS at a high intensity factor, the kind of top-end work that keeps an endurance engine from going flat. He trains pyramidal: a wide aerobic base under one or two quality days, with the occasional run in 33-degree heat and a standing strength habit holding the whole structure together.
What the score caught
| Date | Total | Fitness Base | Overload |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-05-10 | 78 | 88 | 76 |
| 2026-05-24 | 74 | 89 | 43 |
| 2026-06-07 | 73 | 92 | 39 |
| 2026-06-14 | 72 | 92 | 43 |
| 2026-06-20 | 82 | 91 | 100 |
Read the two right-hand columns together and you can watch the build work. Through May and early June his Overload subscore fell from 76 to the high thirties: that is what deep aerobic accumulation looks like, lots of volume, not much sparkle. The whole time, his Fitness Base never moved off the high eighties and low nineties. Then this week the Overload snapped back to 100 and the Total jumped to its highest of the block. The engine absorbed the base and is now ready to take a sharper load. Underneath all of it sits a CTL of 107 and a Load Management subscore parked at 95, week after week.
Sixty-eight days
There is no taper to talk about yet. This is the part of the calendar where the long fatigue-resistance rides get longer and the quality days get pointier, all of it pointed at one Saturday in August where the goal is simply to not stop. The next few score snapshots should show the Total holding while the specific endurance keeps deepening. That is the run-in to a 24-hour race: not a peak you chase, but a floor you keep raising.
Ride safe through the build, François. The night will come around soon enough.
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