On Saturday 5 September, @tebatso-mokgokolo rode a stage of the Alpine Panorama route on ROUVY, Schangnau to Thun, on a trainer in South Africa. Somewhere in that ride he held 243 W for ten minutes, the best ten minutes he had recorded.
The next weekly snapshot put his estimated FTP at 227 W. The three before it had all read 217.
Here is the part that makes it worth writing about. His fitness (CTL) that week was about 35. In mid-August it had been 34, and today it is 34 again. The amount of training barely changed. What changed was that the training started happening.
He is also the first rider from Africa in this series, and his season runs the other way round from most of the riders before him: while Europe winds down, his A race is still ahead.
The month the sessions started landing
In the second week of August his Consistency score read 13. The sessions were on his calendar, and few of them were landing.
Three weeks later it read 97. It read 97 again the week after, and 99 in the week of his September gravel race.
Nothing about the work in between is glamorous. Fat Max rides. Endurance with tempo pushes. Most of it is 45 to 75 minutes on ROUVY, very often ridden in the early morning. On 24 August he rode two ten-minute threshold intervals at 220 W and 232 W, and the next morning seven two-minute VO2max efforts.
The week has a shape he set himself. His settings ask for Wednesdays off the bike for strength, and Saturdays for a long ride of three to four hours. You can see the Wednesdays in the files: most weeks since mid-August have a strength session on that day.
The Saturday that went long
On 20 September he raced a gravel event of nearly four hours. The fortnight after it was mostly easy riding: spins of 25 to 75 minutes.
Then came Saturday 3 October. The day's session was 94 minutes of aerobic endurance, worth 72 TSS. He rode 103 kilometres with 999 metres of climbing, 3 hours 51 minutes of moving time, 237 TSS at a normalized power of 183 W. Close to an hour of it was at or above threshold.
That is more than three times the load the day asked for. It is also squarely the long Saturday his own settings describe.
It had a cost, and the files show that too. Two days later he ended a threshold session at well under half of its 63 minutes.
The number that went down
His eFTP today is 224 W, three watts under the September high. It read 226 through the race weeks and has eased to 224 since. That is the shape you expect around a race and two weeks of easy riding. The ten watts from August are still almost all there.
For the longer view: his first snapshot with IntervalCoach, in June, read 212 W.
What the score noticed
| Week | Total | Consistency |
|---|---|---|
| Aug 9 | 50 | 13 |
| Aug 30 | 67 | 97 |
| Sep 20 | 71 | 99 |
| Oct 2 | 73 | 72 |
Fitness Base moved from 53 to 58 in mid-August and has held there since. Consistency eased to 72 in the fortnight after the race, and the Total still reached 73, his highest so far. The column that matches his threshold is the Consistency one: the watts arrived in the weeks after the sessions did.
What is ahead
947 RideJoburg is on Sunday 22 November, 39 days from today. His plan has him in Peak weeks through the end of October, then two taper weeks and race week.
Watch his eFTP in the snapshots after the taper. If the August pattern holds, the 227 comes back before the start line.
You can follow him at intervalcoach.app/p/tebatso-mokgokolo. You can see your own version of this on your Analytics page: your eFTP history, your consistency, the shape of your own season. And if you would like to be featured in a future spotlight, reply to any IntervalCoach email and say so.