Most people tell a coach what they want to do. JiMaocc told hers what to look for.
Her coaching instructions, translated from the Chinese, are one of the most specific briefs in the whole system. Road riding is the priority. Use my power curve to analyse my weak points, and design the training that fixes them, so that I become more all-round. Monday, Wednesday and Friday for three different intensity themes. Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday for road rides, with Saturday the long one. Then the line that shows she has actually thought about it: on the road it is hard to execute a session perfectly, so build in redundancy, and keep those days suitable for riding outdoors. And finally, if you are going to give me two hours of Zone 2, put something in the middle of it, because the trainer is boring.
I asked her where that brief came from. The answer is the least mystical version possible. She had been riding for a few years without training in any structured way, and she already knew roughly where she was weak. What was new was having something that would build the sessions for it. Doing the training you do not like, the training that hurts, really is more effective, she said. So she went looking for how far the coach could be pushed, and wrote the most detailed prompt she could.
Five months later, here is what her power curve did.
| Best effort | February | Now |
|---|---|---|
| 20 minutes | 146 W | 181 W |
| 5 minutes | 172 W | 216 W |
| 1 minute | 259 W | 268 W |
The twenty minute number is up 24 percent. The five minute number is up 26 percent. The one minute number, the part she was already relatively good at, moved by three percent. She asked to have the flat part of her curve raised, and the flat part went up while the sharp end stayed roughly where it was. That is not a coincidence, it is the assignment.
Two very different halves
What makes this one worth writing is that the five months are not one story. They are two, and only the first half looks like a training plan.
February to April was winter, and she trained indoors. With a trainer under the bike, executing a prescribed session is easy: the workout loads, the numbers are there, you do it. That is the block where the structure went in.
Then in April she moved to Europe for six months, and the trainer did not come with her. Everything since has been road riding. She got lucky with the geography and she knows it: she landed somewhere hilly, and once you are on real climbs, threshold and VO2max work more or less prescribe themselves. You do not need a file telling you to go hard when the road is going up.
So she stopped executing the plan. Her own account of what happened next is more interesting than any claim I could make for the product. She did not follow the sessions, but she kept a rough eye on the intensity they were asking for, and after months of that the way she thinks about training had shifted underneath her. That is a smaller claim than "the plan made her faster" and I think it is the more useful one. The winter block built something real. The plan then became a reference she rode against rather than a script she followed, and the curve kept climbing.
She expects to swing back the other way when she gets home, especially once winter starts and the trainer comes out again.
How she actually rides now
Look at her recent record and almost every ride is logged as unplanned. What she does out there is not small. On the fifth of July she rode 330 minutes for 408 TSS. On the twenty first, 328 minutes for 394, five and a half hours whose analysis notes efforts reaching into Zone 5 and Zone 6.
Those days are not workouts, they are expeditions. She plans them on Komoot and against Strava heatmaps, and the point of going out is to see where a road ends up. The training is a by-product of wanting to look at something new, which is probably why she keeps doing five-hour days without anyone needing to prescribe them.
She is honest in her calendar too, which I appreciate more than she probably realises. There is a day in mid July simply marked 感冒, a cold. There is a ride a couple of weeks later that she named 感冒好像终于好了: the cold finally seems to be gone.
What the score noticed
Her Training Score does not read like a straight line, and it should not.
| Week | Total | Fitness Base |
|---|---|---|
| Jun 21 | 61 | 81 |
| Jul 5 | 58 | 80 |
| Jul 12 | 65 | 82 |
| Jul 26 | 65 | 79 |
The total swings because her training swings: a five hour day, then nothing, then a cold, then another five hour day. The score reads the rhythm of a season. The power curve reads what the season built. Those are two different questions, and hers answer differently on purpose. She trains on a Pyramidal model, and her fitness peaked at a CTL of 116 in May before settling into the low nineties now.
Three days in the Alps
In the middle of August she has three consecutive days in the Austrian Alps on her calendar. Not a race: three routes she planned herself, back to back to back, around five and a half thousand metres of climbing across them.
It is a good test of the thing she asked for in February. A rider who is only sharp is fine for one day. Being more all-round is what gets you to the third one.
You can see your own version of this on your Analytics page: your power curve, your eFTP history, the shape of your own 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.