This is the first of a new weekly series: one IntervalCoach athlete a week, one real arc, told the way they are living it. First up is @vonpiter, who in three days will roll out into 500 km of Polish gravel and try to keep moving until he sees the finish line of UŁAN 600, somewhere around hour 25.
He will ride through one full night, on his own, mostly unsupported. Pacing and fueling will matter more than peak watts. The only intensity that counts is the one he can hold for as long as it takes. That single constraint has shaped every session he has done since February.
The ride that mattered most was not the hardest one
If you ask me which session over the last three months was the most important, I would not pick a VO2max workout. I would pick the 6-hour endurance ride on April 12, twenty-four days out from the start line. 295 TSS, IF 0.70, the only ride over four hours in 90 days of training.
He rode it not for fitness (there is no fitness gain in any single Z2 ride) but to find out whether his stomach, his saddle, his hands, and his contact points all still worked in hour five. They did. So now, three weeks later, he knows. The single biggest piece of information you can carry into a 500 km night ride is this: I have already been on this bike, in this position, for six hours, and I came home okay.
Then the polish
Most athletes, given a 500 km goal, would just ride longer and longer rides into it. @vonpiter did the opposite. After the 6-hour ride, his mid-April was fourteen double-day sessions in sixteen days: short morning Z2, sharper afternoon work. Frequency over single-session length. The gravel-ultra-specific pattern. It is a quietly difficult kind of week to execute, because nothing on any individual day looks heroic. The point is the stack.
Then a sharp single VO2max block on a 1°C day at the end of April: 3-minute Z6 efforts at 370-426 W, decoupling under 10% even on the longer intervals. A fresh top end, just before the engine had to stop being asked to grow and start being asked to hold.
What the score noticed
The Training Score caught up with what was happening on the road right at the end:
| Date | Total | Overload |
|---|---|---|
| 2026-04-19 | 46 | 45 |
| 2026-04-26 | 49 | 70 |
| 2026-05-03 | 47 | 60 |
| 2026-05-05 | 55 | 100 |
Progressive Overload 45 → 70 → 60 → 100 in four weekly snapshots. The structural maximum, in the same week as the start line. The score is reporting what is true: your weekly TSS and ramp rate are exactly right for what is in front of you. He did not train for the score. The score noticed his training.
Friday
He is in Race Week now. Two short maintenance rides, two rest days, openers on Thursday, start line Friday morning. TSB +2.6, fresher than he has been since February. Whatever happens out on the gravel, the training is in the bag.
If you ride long, you know what the night looks like. If you do not, imagine the cone of a bar light on a forest road, the sound of tires on grit, the temperature dropping, the sky changing colour twice before you stop. Imagine your only company being the rider you used to be in February, two thousand TSS ago, when none of this was possible yet.
That is what he is riding into.
Follow @vonpiter
Catch his post-race numbers (and any future arcs) at intervalcoach.app/p/vonpiter. And if you would like to be featured here yourself, make your profile public in Settings → Account → Public Profile, and we will write the next one from your own dashboard.
Good luck on Friday, VonPiter. Race the build you trained for.