VELOARCHITECT

Stage racing is not a sequence of single-day events. The Athlete completes 4–9 consecutive days of racing with overnight recovery windows that are shorter than the body’s natural recovery cycle. Off-the-shelf plans treat each day as an independent FTP test; Veloarchitect reads the Athlete’s day-to-day Mechanical Efficiency and Readiness Ratio and rewrites the next day’s intent to preserve the Athlete across the week. Protocol 11 — Mechanical Efficiency — and Protocol 4 — Recovery Spin — are the load-bearing protocols across the racing week.

The stage race segment is the segment where Mechanical Efficiency is the primary fitness metric. An Athlete whose Mechanical Efficiency drops 8% from day 1 to day 5 is in mechanical-work accumulation collapse; the system reads the drop before the Athlete feels it and rewrites day 6’s intent to a Recovery Spin or Z2, not the planned Threshold block. Adaptive Workout computes the next-day intent from the previous day’s adaptive signal, not the calendar the Athlete set in January. Failure Horizon projection tightens day-over-day; the Athlete who ignores the tightening arrives at day 7 with a collapsed horizon and a DNF.

Protocols: Protocol 10 — Adaptive Workout; Protocol 4 — Recovery Spin

Worked Example — 6-day stage race, 90 minutes per stage

Athlete: 33y/o, 280W FTP, 1.59 W/bpm pre-race. Stage 1: race Execution Precision 0.91; Mechanical Efficiency holds at 1.59 W/bpm overnight. Stage 2: Mechanical Efficiency 1.58 W/bpm; Readiness Ratio 0.84; Adaptive Workout rewrites Stage 3 from planned Threshold to Z2 + 2×8 at 100% FTP. Stage 4: Mechanical Efficiency rebounds to 1.60 W/bpm (the Z2 rewrite worked); Stage 5 dispatched at original intent. Stage 6: Mechanical Efficiency 1.61 W/bpm; cumulative mechanical-work ledger permits the planned 4×10 Threshold. Final stage Execution Precision: 0.93. Athlete finishes with Mechanical Efficiency above pre-race baseline — the system preserved the Athlete across the week.