“I’ll call him crazy to his face” – Mads Pedersen stunned by rival’s “insane” training methods

Some riders chase marginal gains. Others chase suffering.

When Mads Pedersen heard how one of his rivals trains through the Scandinavian winter, he did not dress it up politely. He called it “crazy”. Not behind closed doors either. Straight to his face, if needed.

The rider in question is Uno X’s Jonas Abrahamsen, a man whose winter routine has quietly become legend among pros who know what it actually means to sit on a trainer for hours when the roads outside are frozen, filthy and borderline unridable.

Pedersen laid it out on the podcast Lang Distance, reacting to how often Abrahamsen chooses the hometrainer over the road: “If he hears this, I have no problem calling him crazy straight to his face. I can stretch it to riding five hours in one block if the weather is really awful. But he does it every day. He rides more hours indoors than outdoors. That’s insane.”

Training through winter in Norway is not romantic. Slush, sleet and ice make consistent outdoor riding almost impossible for long periods. For most riders, that means mixing short outdoor rides with indoor sessions.

Abrahamsen goes further. He is known for pulling the hometrainer out several times a week, often choosing long indoor blocks instead of fighting the roads. His Strava data shows just how extreme that can get.

On 29 December, he rode 168 kilometres indoors, spending four and a half hours on the trainer at an average of 332 watts, according to Strava. That is not a short recovery spin or a broken-up session. It is a full race-length effort done with no coasting, no descents and no natural breaks.

Pedersen understands suffering for a purpose. What he cannot understand is choosing that level of monotony every single day.

The trainer is only part of the story.

Recently, Abrahamsen shared a training video filmed in minus 22 degrees, riding outside in conditions that most riders would not even consider safe, let alone useful.

That mix of extremes seems to define him. When it is too dangerous to ride outside, he goes inside for marathon sessions. When he does ride outside, he does not shy away from brutal cold. It is not about comfort or convenience. It is about controlling the work, whatever the conditions demand.

This is not suffering for social media.

On 16 July, Abrahamsen took the biggest win of his career when he won stage 11 of the Tour de France. He ground his rivals down in the breakaway, then beat Mauro Schmid in the sprint to seal the stage.

That win changed how many people looked at him. He stopped being just the rider who goes in breaks and became someone who could finish them off.

Seen through that lens, his winter routine looks less like chaos and more like commitment taken to an extreme. Pedersen may call it crazy, but Abrahamsen is the one who keeps turning those hours, those watts and those frozen rides into results when it matters.