@tino-76 is 49, and he is honest about what that means. Recovery is slower than it used to be, and long threshold efforts tend to break him before they build him. So he does not train like a 25-year-old. On 6 June he went out and rode for just over three hours and put 309 TSS into the day anyway.
The note he left IntervalCoach is refreshingly direct: he struggles with recovery, he cannot finish long threshold sets, and he would rather have short, fractioned intervals than one big sustained grind. Most athletes fight their constraints. He coaches to them. After a spring of long gravel days and a flat, quiet May, he is rebuilding, and this is the athlete I wanted to write about: someone who has stopped pretending the calendar does not matter and started training smarter because of it.
The session that mattered
On 6 June he rode for 3h07 and racked up 309 TSS, the biggest single day of his rebuild. The flavor was anaerobic: lots of short, sharp efforts stitched into a long ride, which is exactly the micro-interval shape he asked for rather than a twenty-minute threshold block he would not have finished. A few days earlier, a 823 W power spike on the road showed the legs still snap. The top end is there. He just gets at it in short bursts now.
The shape of the build
His plan runs on an Undulating model: hard and easy days woven close together instead of long single-purpose blocks. That suits a rider who recovers slowly, because it almost never stacks two big days back to back. The plan also leans away from the long threshold work he told us he cannot absorb, and toward sweet spot and the shorter, fractioned efforts that actually leave him intact for the next session.
What the score noticed
His Training Score dipped through the middle of May and has climbed back since.
| Week | Total | Overload |
|---|---|---|
| 26 Apr | 54 | 48 |
| 10 May | 44 | 43 |
| 17 May | 41 | 39 |
| 24 May | 52 | 68 |
| 7 Jun | 50 | 60 |
The dip was real: a low, flat stretch where the volume fell off. The climb back is the rebuild showing up in the data. The score did not fix anything. He did, by getting back on the bike and doing the work in the doses his body actually accepts.
The moment ahead
An FTP test sits about a month out, the next honest checkpoint. The interesting question for a 49-year-old is how much top-end is still there when the training finally respects the recovery instead of fighting it. We will see it in the number.
You can follow @tino-76 at intervalcoach.app/p/tino-76. If you want to see your own training this way, your Analytics page carries the same Training Score and history. And if you would like to be featured here, set your profile public in settings and pick a handle.