Raise the Floor

A few years ago I had an athlete — strong engine, big ceiling. The kind of rider who could make a couple of efforts in a hard group ride that made everyone else's legs hurt just watching. But every season looked the same: a few electric days, then a slow bleed of form through fatigue, injury, and inconsistent training.

Frustrated, we changed his approach. We stopped chasing the electric days. We started protecting the boring ones.

Everyone trains for the peak — the breakthrough workout, the power record and Strava PR, the day everything clicks. But the athletes who actually improve year over year aren't optimizing their ceiling. They're raising their floor.

Here's the physiology in short: it's the repeated, moderate stuff — not the rare all-out days — that builds the aerobic enzymes, capillary density, and fat-oxidation capacity endurance is actually made of. Sporadic hard efforts without a steady base add fatigue and injury risk without much of that adaptation to show for it.

The math of your accumulated, chronic training load (CTL) backs this up. Your CTL is really just an average of recent weeks' load — missed sessions drag it down a lot faster than a big weekend pushes it up. One huge ride doesn't make you fit. Six steady weeks do.

Growth doesn't happen on the memorable days. It happens on the Tuesday you didn't feel like it, the easy spin when you wanted to push but checked yourself. Those rides don't make good stories or social media posts. But they're what raises the floor.

See ya next week,
Steve