Most spring race calendars leave a rider in pieces by June. Kris just kept showing up. Since April he has lined up for one round after another of a regional road-race series in eastern China, and in early September he rolls out for the next one: a gran fondo on the sixth. The races are the season; the gran fondo is the next box to tick.
What made me want to write this one is not a result. It is the flatness of the line under everything else. For two months his fitness has sat at a level most riders only touch on their single best week, and it has stayed there through a full racing block. That is rare, and it is worth looking at.
One week, two very different rides
The engine shows up best in contrast. In a single mid-June week Kris did a 192 TSS day built around repeated neuromuscular sprints, several of them over 1000 watts, the kind of effort that decides a bunch sprint or bridges a gap. A few days later he rolled out for a three-hour endurance ride and came home with a cardiac drift of 1.6 percent, which is to say his heart rate barely climbed across three hours of riding. Punch on one day, deep aerobic economy on the next. That range is exactly what a road race demands, and he has both ends of it.
It is not new fitness, either. Back in April he rode a 111 km race simulation at 251 watts average for three hours, and the threshold and VO2max work has kept sharpening since: indoor intervals climbing to an intensity factor of 0.85, around 378 watts on the work blocks. He trains polarized, races for his intensity, and rides long for his base.
What the score caught
| Date | Total | Fitness Base | Overload |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-04-26 | 87 | 99 | 50 |
| 2026-05-03 | 94 | 98 | 100 |
| 2026-05-24 | 87 | 97 | 100 |
| 2026-06-07 | 81 | 98 | 78 |
| 2026-06-14 | 82 | 100 | 60 |
| 2026-06-20 | 79 | 99 | 47 |
Look at the middle column and then stop looking at the others. His Fitness Base has not left the high nineties for two months, peaking at a clean 100 in mid-June, in the middle of a race season. The Total moves around as Overload rises and falls with each race and recovery week, which is exactly what it should do. But the base under all of it does not flinch. With a CTL of 88 holding that line, the score is not telling Kris something he does not know. It is confirming what the race calendar already shows: he arrives ready.
September
The gran fondo is about eleven weeks out, which is a comfortable amount of runway for a rider whose base is already this deep. The work now is not to build the engine, it is to point it: more race-specific intensity, the long outdoor efforts that rehearse the day, and the recovery weeks that keep the base from tipping into fatigue. The interesting number will be the post-race snapshot in September, after he has spent everything this spring has been quietly storing up.
Kris rides in the open on Strava if you want to follow the build toward September.
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