On Saturday, Jos rolls out for 100 miles of the Beukers Bikecentre Rebound. The four days before that, he was in Merano, in the Italian Alps near Bolzano, riding the mountain bike for eleven hours across four straight rides. (The original plan was Livigno, but the peaks still had too much snow, so the trip moved south.) That is the kind of training week that either makes the race or breaks it.
Jos is not a pro. He is a Dutch athlete with a long-running Sunday ritual: long endurance, three times twenty minutes at threshold, on the mountain bike.
The boring part that actually worked
The line in his calendar that does the heavy lifting is the one that repeats: "MTB Endurance 3,5 hours Z2 + 3x20 min FTP". Two hundred and eighteen minutes. 275 TSS. Intensity factor 0.87. He executed that same template on six consecutive Sundays from April 5 through May 10. Same duration. Same TSS. Same intervals. Week after week.
That is the part of a real build that nobody photographs. The day-after-day execution of one specific session until the legs decide it is no longer hard. By the end of that run, his CTL had climbed from 62 to 73 without a single hero ride. Just the same session, done six times.
Merano
Then he changed altitude. From May 21 to May 24, four straight rides in the Italian Alps. Three at a brutal intensity factor of 0.96 across three hours. The closing day was sixty minutes at IF 1.22, the most intense session of his entire 90-day window. Eleven hours and 950 TSS in four days. The week clocked in at 1,022 TSS, the biggest of the cycle by 250 points. His fatigue (ATL) spiked to 157, the tallest number on his chart this year.
That is not a number you walk away from clean. That is an overload, deliberately taken because there is a Saturday on the calendar where it will matter.
What the score caught
| Date | Total | Overload | Fitness Base |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-05-10 | 63 | 64 | 66 |
| 2026-05-17 | 55 | 30 | 66 |
| 2026-05-24 | 56 | 37 | 68 |
The score reads the camp as a finishing flourish on a long base. Fitness base ticked up to 68 across the cycle. Overload subscore is intentionally low right now because he is shedding fatigue, not adding to it. That is what a taper is supposed to look like.
What does not show up in the table, but shows up in the calendar: twenty-five yoga sessions and six strength workouts across the same 90 days. The yoga is about staying flexible, because tight fascia has gotten Jos in trouble before. The strength work is mostly upper body and core, the kind that holds you together on a long descent over Alpine rock after the legs have already done the climb. In thirty degrees of heat, that infrastructure is what lets him absorb a 1,000 TSS week without his body filing a complaint.
Saturday
CTL peaked at 83.4 on the closing day of Merano. The race plan projects a 370 TSS day across 100 miles. The model has him landing at CTL 79 and ATL 114 by Sunday morning, which is the signature of a hard but absorbable race effort.
This week is short Z1 spins, full rest, then a 100-minute Z2 loosener on Friday. By Saturday morning, the work is done and the day is just the day.
Good luck out there, Jos. The post-race snapshot will tell us what the bet was worth.
Want to see what your own arc looks like? The Training Score lives on your dashboard and analytics page. The shape of a build is harder to see when you are inside it, which is the whole point of the score.