On June 24, Phaidra rode for seven hours and eighteen minutes. Not a race, not an epic in the mountains: an endurance ride, 336 TSS at an intensity factor of 0.68, sitting in the middle of the biggest training week of her year. Most of the day was deliberately, almost boringly easy. That is the point.
Phaidra did not come to cycling the usual way. Her background is in powerlifting, where she competed for five years at the provincial and national levels. Now she is building as a road cyclist and, increasingly, a crit racer, with a season split in two: climbing and road races first, crits later.
She trains the way few amateurs are willing to: ten or eleven sessions in a heavy week, the bike carrying nearly all the load while walking, strength and light yoga fill the edges as recovery. She is not chasing one result this summer so much as rebuilding a system. The goal she set, in her own words to the coach, is to become a climber: a bigger aerobic engine, more threshold, more sustained power up a gradient. The kind of engine that pays off when the road tilts up. The big date on the calendar is September 16: the Tour de Gatineau, a UCI 1.1 road race, and the time trial that opens it, seventy-four days out.
The seven-hour cruise
That June 24 ride is the clearest window into how she works. It landed inside an 814 TSS week, her heaviest of the spring, and it was almost entirely aerobic: a long, low, patient grind that does nothing dramatic on any single hour and everything across four months. Her coach did not invent the day around her so much as adapt to it. That week, IntervalCoach reshuffled her sessions five times to fit around her own club rides and races, every swap landing clean. The plan defers to the athlete who is clearly already doing the work.
That fit is not an accident. "IntervalCoach has been hugely helpful in balancing work trips, race events, and regular life," Phaidra says. "A big part of my improvement this season comes from its ability to interpret my data and turn it into actionable insights."
Easy, then ferocious
This is polarized training the way the textbook draws it. The bulk of her volume sits at that 0.68 cruise intensity, hour after hour of true Zone 2. The sharp end is genuinely sharp: a road race at Charlevoix at 0.87, a short and brutal regional race at 0.89, a climb ridden at an intensity factor above 1.0. Very easy or very hard, with little in between. And the volume is not relentless for its own sake. The week of May 10 drops to 256 TSS, a real recovery week heavy on yoga, before the build steps back up. Big weeks are only worth anything if you absorb them.
A sprinter in the bunch
By default, Phaidra is a sprinter, and the data backs her up: her five-second power sits at 4.2 times her FTP, and at this week's Tuesday-night crit she topped out at 996 watts. That punch has already put her in serious company this season. Racing crits between her road blocks, she has lined up against Grand Monument winners, Alison Jackson of St. Michel-Preference Home-Auber among them, and come away with a solid fourth place. It is also exactly why the climbing goal is the deliberate one. The sprint she already has; the VAM and sustained endurance she is building with the coach, already on display at Charlevoix, are the parts that have to be earned.
The engine, in the data
The number worth watching is not her overall Training Score, which bounces around in the sixties and seventies because her multi-sport mix keeps the consistency component noisy. It is Fitness Base, the part of the score that tracks the aerobic engine she is deliberately building:
| Date | Total | Fitness Base |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-04-19 | 68 | 43 |
| 2026-05-24 | 64 | 64 |
| 2026-06-14 | 61 | 69 |
| 2026-06-28 | 75 | 87 |
Forty-three to eighty-seven in ten weeks. That is a climber's engine arriving, one easy hour at a time. Her CTL now sits at 89, up more than six points in the last week alone: fitness still climbing, not holding.
Seventy-four days to Gatineau
From here the plan tightens. Another build week, a recovery week to absorb the block, three more weeks of build, a peak, then the taper into September 16. A time trial rewards exactly what she has spent the spring building: the ability to hold a hard, even power for the length of the effort, with no wheels to hide behind. The engine is bigger than it was in April. Now it gets sharpened.
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Ride strong in Gatineau, Phaidra.