The season
Six events run from late 2026 into mid-2027, and they are not equals. Each one carries a priority that decides what the surrounding weeks look like — whether the build pauses for a taper or simply absorbs the race and keeps going.
max 2 A-races / year
A limit written into the athlete's own data, not a suggestion. Every other event on this calendar is deliberately downgraded so the build never fragments into a string of half-tapers that add up to no fitness at all.
B-race — reframed down from A once Klagenfurt became the sole season target it serves rather than owns. Mini-taper on paper; in practice the coach still holds most of weeks 9–10's taper anyway, because it's his first triathlon ever, raced in heat, and safety outranks the label.
Short and fast, two weeks after Kinneret. Treated as a hard session with a bib on: no taper, raced deliberately easy, and it doubles as a reintroduction to intensity after the recovery block.
Postponed from 19 Sep, so it now lands after Kinneret instead of 27 days before it — the pre-race open-water benchmark it was meant to be is gone, and the race goes in unmeasured on that front. What's left: an unaided swim early in the Austria base block, six days ahead of the Haifa half. No taper.
A pure run block marker. Useful because the standalone half tells you what the run actually is when it isn't buried under 90 km of bike.
Reframed down from B once Kinneret stopped being the season's second A-race — no taper, train straight through it. The climbing is still the point: this is where the winter's strength work either shows up on a gradient or doesn't, six months before Klagenfurt.
The end goal. A Wörthersee swim, a bike through Carinthia, a lakeside marathon. Full three-week taper and a recovery block that closes the season. Every block before it is scaffolding for this day.
The load split
The ten weeks between now and the Kinneret alternate on purpose: three weeks building load, one deload week to absorb it, three more build weeks, a peak week, then two taper weeks into race day. Skipping the light weeks is exactly how the heavy ones stop working.
Bar height and opacity both encode the same thing: full-height, full-opacity weeks are build/peak load; the shorter, lighter weeks are deload and taper — cut by 20-60% on purpose, not skipped by accident. Week 6 is the biggest of the block; week 4's deload is what makes weeks 5-7 possible without breaking down first.