Javier rides out of Palma, on the roads the rest of us fly across Europe to ride once a year. His season sits on a big engine: a CTL in the low 80s and a Fitness Base that has not dropped below 80 in a month. This spring he pointed it at the Mallorca 312, the 312 km gran fondo that laps the whole island, built for it inside IntervalCoach, and finished. Now the same engine is aimed at La Purito.
What made me want to write this one is not a comeback or a breakthrough week. It is the rare thing that does not make headlines: a large engine, held steady. Most athletes chase a peak and then watch it leak away. Javier just keeps showing up, seven rides a week, a four-hour Saturday grupeta, climbing repeats on Thursdays. The Mallorca 312 already proved the engine is not theoretical: 312 km in a single day is the kind of test that only rewards the rider who put in the months beforehand. La Purito, the brutal mass-participation climbing day in Andorra, rewards exactly that kind of patient, repeatable volume.
The ride that mattered
On 30 May he rode for 4h38 and put up 204 TSS, and the detail that matters is where the hard efforts landed: the Z4 blocks were stacked at the end of the long ride, not the start. That is climbing power produced under accumulated fatigue, which is the entire test of a long mountain gran fondo. A week later, on 6 June, he held 10-minute Z4 intervals close to FTP cleanly in the heat across a 2h58 ride. The engine is not just big. It still turns over hard when he is tired.
The shape of the build
His plan runs on a Pyramidal model: a deep aerobic base with a layer of threshold on top, and a lot of weekly volume underneath all of it. It is the right shape for a long day in the mountains, where the decisive quality is not your five-minute power but how much you can keep doing after four hours. The week-to-week consistency is the engine; the climbs are where it pays out.
What the score noticed
His Training Score has not climbed lately, and that is the point.
| Week | Total | Fitness Base |
|---|---|---|
| 10 May | 64 | 82 |
| 17 May | 67 | 82 |
| 24 May | 65 | 83 |
| 31 May | 66 | 83 |
| 7 Jun | 67 | 80 |
A Fitness Base above 80 is near the top of what the metric measures. It is not rising because there is not much room left to rise. Holding it there, week after week, while staying healthy enough to keep training, is harder than any single big number. The score is reporting a rider who has built something and is keeping it.
The moment ahead
La Purito is on 2 August. Between now and then the volume sharpens into the specific work the climbs demand. The interesting question is not whether the engine is big enough, it clearly is, but how he carries it up the final passes when the day is long. We will see it in his post-event numbers.
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