This week Martin is somewhere in the Julian Alps, deep into a four-day mountain camp. Day three is a queen stage on paper: Mangart, Vršič and Predel stacked into one ride, 111 kilometres and close to 2,900 metres of climbing. He is 40 days out from the Lawi Tour, the gran fondo he has pointed his summer at. But the camp is not really why I wanted to write this one.
What made me want to write it is how little of Martin's training looks like a training plan. Scroll his calendar and you will not find a wall of "IntervalCoach - VO2max 4x4" workouts. You will find his own rides: club sessions he calls "Klubový švih", six-hour Saturdays in the Orlické hory, two training camps in Spain over the spring, and now four days of Slovenian passes. He rides what he wants to ride. What IntervalCoach does is adapt around it: reshaping the load, moving the hard days, pulling volume back when the week is already deep. Over the last few months it has adjusted his plan 45 times, and 37 of those adjustments came back with an outcome we can measure. The success rate is 97 percent. That is the whole idea of the product in one athlete: the coach fits around the rider, not the rider around the coach.
The ride that shows how he trains
Take his club ride on the eleventh of July. Six hours and twenty-five minutes, 273 TSS, one of the biggest single rides he has logged all summer, and rated a nine out of ten for how well it landed. It was not a workout anyone prescribed him. It was a Saturday with his club, and the plan simply absorbed it: counted the load, registered the fatigue, and adjusted the days on either side so a six-hour ride did not turn into a hole he had to climb out of. A few days earlier the one genuinely structured session in the block, VO2max efforts of three minutes, ran at 393 to 396 watts. But the spine of his training is long, hard, self-directed hours, and the plan is built to work with exactly that.
A season built on volume
The shape of the year is a rider who never stops accumulating. His biggest weeks ran to 544, 507 and 505 TSS, and May and June were a string of long gran fondos: Sudety Tour at 147 kilometres, Mamut Tour, the Orlické Hory road stage, KCM. He took one real break in mid-June, a week his calendar simply labels "návrat", the return, before rebuilding straight into a Slovenian mountain camp. He trains polarized: a wide, patient aerobic base with the occasional sharp day sitting on top, and long climbs doing most of the work.
What the score caught
| Date | Total | Fitness Base |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-04-26 | 78 | 82 |
| 2026-05-31 | 70 | 81 |
| 2026-06-14 | 71 | 89 |
| 2026-07-05 | 77 | 85 |
| 2026-07-12 | 70 | 86 |
This is what a locked-in engine looks like on the Training Score. The Total has bounced between the high sixties and high seventies for three straight months, but the column that matters is the second one: Fitness Base living in the low-to-high eighties the entire time, which is a rare and hard-won place to sit. His Load Management subscore has read 95 on every single snapshot of the year. A rider putting away 500-TSS weeks and mountain camps without ever tipping into the red is not lucky. He is deep enough in the base that the big weeks land as training instead of damage.
The run-in to the Lawi Tour
The camp finishes this weekend, then a recovery week soaks up the fatigue and the block turns toward late August. There is no drama in the plan from here, just the patient part: keep the base where it is, sharpen a little, and arrive at the Lawi Tour with a season of volume underneath him. With a Fitness Base in the mid-eighties and a summer of mountains already in the legs, the start line is going to find him ready.
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