Building the Engine (well, one of us for now)

It's been quiet here for a month. That was the plan - we told you back in April that posting would slow down, because Cape Epic 2027 is still a long way off and there's only so much you can write about maintenance training before it starts to read like a logbook. So Jeroen and I have been doing what we always do between the bigger pieces: training separately, talking about cycling (although that is also significantly less now) and working.

This week something is worth saying. Unfortunately it's not the good kind of news.

Jeroen vs. the basketball court

Two days ago, Jeroen collapsed his ankle during basketball training. Not on the bike, not on a trail, not doing anything remotely related to the thing we're supposedly training for, but on a basketball court. The ankle gave way underneath him and that was that.

He obviously can't walk properly at the moment, which means cycling is comfortably off the table for a while. How long, we don't know yet, but a couple of weeks at least.

There's a particular irony in this. We spend a lot of words on this blog being careful - pacing, conservative early-stage power targets, immune suppression after big training weeks, the whole apparatus of not breaking yourself. And then an ankle goes on a basketball court. The bike, it turns out, was never the most dangerous thing in the room.

So this one is partly a get-well note. Heal up properly, Jeroen. Don't rush it. We've got a finisher's medal to go and collect in 2027, and that requires two functioning halves of a team. I did my part of being that half that doesn't finish, I can unfortunately not allow you to repeat that trick.

Meanwhile, the rest of us keep pedaling

For those of us still upright, the training continues — quietly, but it continues.

We came out of Cape Epic genuinely fit. I've written before about the super compensation that followed the race, the FTP that climbed from 290 to 313 watts almost on its own. That kind of fitness is a gift, but it's not a permanent one. Left alone, it drifts back down toward the old baseline. So the job right now isn't really building in the dramatic sense - it's holding. Maintaining what the race handed us, and keeping the foundation intact until the structured build phase for 2027 starts in earnest.

I'm not staring at the JOIN app too much at the moment. It's still there, still the backbone of how this all gets structured eventually, but this phase doesn't need micromanaging. This phase needs volume, consistency, and not doing anything stupid.

The aerobic engine, and why I'm chasing it

My personal focus for this stretch is simple: expand the aerobic engine.

If you've followed the blog, you'll know I have a few physiological quirks that work in my favour — a high lactate tolerance among them, the ability to sit in the red a bit longer than is strictly reasonable for a 45-year-old. But the thing that actually carries you through eight days of stage racing isn't your ability to suffer at threshold. It's the size of the aerobic base underneath everything. That's the engine that lets you produce power, hour after hour, day after day, without burning matches you can't afford to burn.

You don't build that base with intervals. You build it with long, patient, unglamorous ''zone 2'' riding. Time in the saddle, heart rate composed, power deliberately kept where it almost feels too easy. It's the least exciting training there is, and it's the most important.

So I've started scheduling long zone 2 rides into the week. Friday is becoming the day for it and especially now with the long summer days and better temperatures, it so much easier to just do it.

Tomorrow: five hours, and a personal first

Tomorrow — Friday — I'm going out for a five-hour ride. I have never done a 5-hour ride in the Netherlands. Not once. Only during Cape Epic we crossed that line every day, but other than that, zero. Doing one here, on home roads, flat and familiar, is genuinely new territory for me. I expect to cover somewhere around 130 kilometres.

There's no drama to it, no story arc beyond "ride steady for a long time." Just 5hours of holding zone 2 and letting the body do the slow, quiet work of getting better. The kind of ride where the adaptation is real but the signal is so faint you'd never notice it on the day itself.

That's the point, though. Cape Epic 2027 will not be won — or finished — on any single heroic session. It'll be built out of dozens of unremarkable Fridays exactly like tomorrow. Long, flat, patient kilometres, stacked one on top of the other until the engine underneath is big enough to carry me across a finish line I didn't reach last time.

One of us is on the sidelines for now. The other is doing five hours on the Dutch flats. Not the most cinematic week in the history of this blog — but it's an honest one, and honest is what we promised you.

Heal up, Jeroen. The rest of us will keep the base warm.

Until then, Keep Chasing!