On the evening of 6 October, Olivier rode five nine-minute efforts at threshold. The first came in at 188 watts. Each one after it was a little stronger, and the last finished at 198, right on his FTP. His plan calls the session "Seuil des côtes", because IntervalCoach coaches him in French.
Two days earlier, on a Sunday morning, he had ridden 101 kilometres in three and a half hours. His plan had asked for 144 TSS. He came home with 245.
Two riders in one week
Olivier is in his fifties and in the last fortnight of an eight-week block he chose for himself, "FTP / Seuil" on his dashboard. Monday to Thursday he rides in the evening, usually starting around eight. Lately those sessions stop at about ninety minutes, which is the time he gives the plan on a weekday. When the plan wrote two hours, as it did on 6 and 7 October, he rode ninety-three minutes of each and called it a night.
Sunday is the other rider. On three Sundays in a row from 20 September, the plan asked for 43, 84 and 144 TSS. He rode 156, 227 and 245, two of them over a hundred kilometres. His Sunday rides record no power, so that load is estimated from heart rate, but the scale is not in doubt: the 4 October ride carried more load than the two threshold sessions later that week put together.
Here is the part I find interesting. Week by week, his plan compliance swings from 71 to 180 percent. Over the first four weeks of the block, he rode 2,629 TSS against 2,527 planned. Four percent apart.
The plan is not a script he follows line by line. It is a budget, and he spends it his own way.
What the block has bought
The capability numbers are where this gets good. His estimated FTP drifted through the summer, from 193 W in early July to 187 W by mid-September. That dip says less about fitness than it looks: eFTP is built from recent hard efforts, and a summer that mixed riding with walking, the odd run and few all-out efforts gives it very little to measure. Once the block started asking for threshold work, the number moved fast. By 25 September it read 198 W.
His best 20 minutes moved the same way: 169 W in mid-September, 203 W by the end of the month. Part of that jump is the same effect running in reverse, because a rolling best only rises when you hand it a hard twenty minutes, and the block finally did. What matters is where it landed: twenty minutes at five watts above the FTP he now trains to.
Underneath it, the aerobic side is quietly improving too. On 1 October he rode ninety minutes of steady endurance at 132 W normalised power. Five weeks earlier, a similar steady ride at 134 W had cost him nine more beats per minute. His fitness (CTL) went from 46 in early July to 82 by early October, nearly double, on a Pyramidal model.
What the score noticed
| Week | Total | Fitness Base |
|---|---|---|
| Jul 12 | 51 | 41 |
| Aug 30 | 62 | 44 |
| Sep 13 | 71 | 53 |
| Oct 2 | 73 | 57 |
The column that explains the rest is one I left out of the table. His Consistency score has sat between 94 and 100 in every weekly snapshot since the end of August. The sessions get cut, stretched and moved, but they happen. Fitness Base climbed sixteen points behind it.
The weeks ahead
The block closes on 7 November. After a recovery week from 19 October, the plan finishes it with two peak weeks, and he is in the first of them now.
My prediction: when the block ends, his eFTP reads above 200 W. The tell will be a weekday threshold set whose last rep finishes above 198 rather than on it. That is the snapshot I will be looking for.
You can see your own version of this on your Analytics page: your eFTP history, your best 20 minutes, the shape of your own block. 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.