On the last Saturday of July, Mattia rode 157 kilometres with 1,867 metres of climbing: five hours and forty-nine minutes of moving time, two half-hour tempo climbs threaded into a long Zone 2 day, 307 TSS. His plan called the session "Lungo Gran Fondo", because that is what it was, a rehearsal for the Gran Fondo Tre Valli Varesine on 4 October.
Three weeks later, his consistency score was 11.
That gap is why I wanted to write about him. Most race builds do not fail on the hard days. They come apart on ordinary weeks, when work runs late, the holidays land, and the plan quietly stops describing the life you are living. Mattia's summer did all of that. He is now four weeks from the start line with a base rebuilt in three weeks and an honest view of what he has, and I think that is a more useful story than a clean one.
July, when everything worked
Late June and July were his best block of the year: a long aerobic Saturday at the end of June, the Maratona dles Dolomites as a C race in the first week of July, which he confirms he rode, then two big Saturdays back to back. 104 kilometres with 1,881 metres of climbing and a set of over-under intervals on the 18th; the 157-kilometre rehearsal a week later. His fitness (CTL) sat in the low seventies all month.
He is a mountain rider by intention. His coaching notes ask for a focus on climbing, and they are candid about the rest: he prefers short intervals, and he knows threshold is where he suffers. Mondays are his tired day, after work travel. Fridays he cannot train. The plan is built around those facts, Polarized in four-week blocks, one long Saturday carrying most of the volume and the weekday sessions kept to an hour on Zwift, with names like "Scatto Ripetuto" and "Soglia Sostenuta" because IntervalCoach coaches him in Italian.
He is just as candid about the shape of the season. In his own words, translated from Italian:
Compared to last year I am riding a little less this year, and with less intensity, because fortunately I share many of my rides with my wife, so you have to adapt.
You can see that in the files. His calendar carries a Saturday the coach titled "Uscita Sociale con Moglie", a three-hour social ride planned at 60 percent of threshold, and his saved coaching notes tell the plan to keep any ride with his wife strictly easy. He also came to IntervalCoach from Spoked, and before that from an Italian app that has since closed its doors; a few of his Saturday sessions still sit in the plan under the Spoked name, adapted in place rather than thrown out.
August, when it did not
Then the summer took over: a niggle at the end of July, a couple of off days, a holiday at the start of August, a week in the Aosta Valley at the end of it. Of the twelve planned sessions he missed this summer, ten sit on a day his calendar already carried a note explaining why. The plan knew, and adapted around it. His fitness slid from 73 in late July to 63 by the second week of August, and kept drifting down to 58.
"I did have a few hiccups, honestly unforeseen," he says, "but all in all the season went well." He also admits, with a grin, to "several discussions with Coach+" from mid-July onwards. I take that as a feature: a rider arguing with his plan is a rider still reading it.
None of that is unusual. What came next is the part worth looking at.
The three weeks that matter
The rebuild started on holiday: an hour and fifty minutes of endurance with fast-cadence blocks in the Aosta Valley on 22 August. A week later, a long progressive ride out of Bormio, all eight work intervals completed. Then the first full week back: five sessions, capped by a four-and-a-half-hour progressive ride on 5 September, 216 TSS, four blocks of work inside it, ridden longer than planned and finished properly.
His consistency score went 11, 54, 74 across those three weeks. Overload came back from 32 to 65. Those are the numbers of a rider showing up again, not of a rider peaking, and the difference matters for what follows.
The number that went down
I should be straight about this part. His estimated FTP was 278 watts in the middle of June. Today it reads 265. His five-minute best from the July block was 344 watts; the best he has shown since is 291. A month of interrupted training costs real watts, and pretending otherwise would make the rest of this post worthless.
He knows. "I lost a bit of form, and I noticed," he says. But he measures it against a different baseline: his last real ramp test, on Zwift last year, read 300 watts by his account, and he tells me he is four kilos lighter now than he was then. "So personally I am still satisfied."
So he is not going to Varese with his best numbers of the year. He is going with a base rebuilt in three weeks, a threshold he has told the coach is his weakness, and a plan with one honest test left in it: a ramp test on 12 September, then two more long Saturdays before the taper.
What the score noticed
The Training Score tracks the summer almost exactly.
| Week | Total | Consistency |
|---|---|---|
| Jun 14 | 74 | 41 |
| Jul 26 | 62 | 19 |
| Aug 16 | 59 | 11 |
| Aug 30 | 68 | 74 |
| Sep 6 | 71 | 57 |
High through the July block, down through August, back to 71 as the sessions returned. Fitness Base, the slow column, eased from 77 to 71 over the same stretch. It takes months to build, and it did not vanish in a month either. That is the part he gets to keep.
Four weeks
The Gran Fondo Tre Valli Varesine runs its tenth edition on 4 October, 126 kilometres on the long route out of Varese, and this year it also hosts the European amateur gran fondo championship. Around four thousand riders are expected. His plan from here reads like a textbook: a peak week now at about 500 TSS, two taper weeks, then a race week of easy spinning and one last two-hour aerobic ride the day before.
"I can't wait to do the Tre Valli Varesine and reset everything," he told me. The plan does not know the summer is over. It knows Saturday is long, Friday is off and Monday is tired, and it will keep adapting around whatever September brings. Watch the ramp test on the 12th, and watch the snapshot the week after Varese. If a base rebuilt in three weeks holds through a taper, that is where it will show.
You can see your own version of this on your Analytics page: your eFTP history, your consistency, the shape of your own summer. 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.