It’s cold. It’s muddy. The sun sets halfway through your warmup. Your toes disappear somewhere around kilometre twenty, and by the time you’re finally warm, you’re already halfway down a descent that’s about to undo all of it. And yet… You still want to ride. Not alone. Not on a turbo. You want your friends there, miserable beside you, like a proper dysfunctional winter peloton.
So here are the five most sneaky, manipulative, and downright diabolical ways to convince them to join you in this delusional quest of year-round cycling.
Use Strava against them
If your mate won’t respond to logic, friendship or the promise of cake, they might still respond to the only thing that truly motivates them in winter: Strava validation.
Because in the post-season void, when races disappear and group rides thin out, some riders develop a very specific kind of illness. One where their self-worth becomes directly tied to digital trophies, coloured heat maps, and the unspoken belief that if it’s not on Strava, it never happened. Their sense of progress is more tightly connected to virtual leaderboards than to their actual numbers.
So this is where you strike. You don’t tell them you’re trying to provoke them. That would ruin the game. You just start riding alone. Quietly. Strategically.
First step: review their Strava. Not for ideas: for targets. You look for the segments they’ve done the most. The ones where they’ve bled on, bonked at, and come back a week later to try again. These are sacred, and you’re in the mood to be a bit sacrilegious. That’s where you ride.
Now, the idea is not to beat them on your first try. You must inch closer and closer every time you ride this segment. No full gas. Just enough effort to show intent. Don’t worry, they will check. They always check. Especially when the ride name is subtle things like, “Just spinning the legs lol” or “Zone 2 with some bumps”.
Then, you wait. Eventually, there will be a message. A passive-aggressive nudge. Maybe a comment about your “interesting route choice”. That’s your green light. Now you can invite them out. Not for a casual spin. No one’s buying that. For a head-to-head. Just one segment. Just for fun. The next week, another one. And another. Before they know it, they’ve been tricked into training through winter. Their pride won’t let them stop. Their legs might, but that’s not your problem.
Use peer pressure like a sociopath
This isn’t peer pressure. This is social engineering. You’re not asking people to ride. You’re constructing a reality in which not riding makes them feel like the last soft-bellied commuter left on Earth.
Step one: lie to everyone. Equally. Aggressively. Let no one know the full truth. If the trail looks like a peat bog in a blender, no one needs to hear that. What they need to hear is that Mark and Tony are “already prepping their gear”, and that “Tony’s even going tubeless for better traction”. Doesn’t matter if Tony hasn’t seen your messages yet. Say it like it’s done.
Step two: control the narrative. No splinter chats. Keep all communication inside the group ride thread, where you can monitor and contain outbreaks of logic. If someone mentions the cold, deflect. “Yeah, but Tony’s out. He says it’s perfect hardtail practice.” If someone shares a weather warning, reply with a photo of last year’s ride that was somehow worse, and everyone survived… barely. But no one remembers that last part.
Step three: praise early, praise hard. If someone hesitates but hasn’t bailed yet, hit them with a public ego bomb: “Honestly, if anyone can handle this weather, it’s Dave. Man’s a machine.” Now Dave’s locked in. He might’ve bailed five minutes later, but now? Not after that. Not without tanking the myth you just built around him.
What happens next is magic. People start hyping the ride themselves. They don’t want to be the one who doubts it now. You’ve created momentum. You’ve built a wave of misplaced enthusiasm, and at that point, all you have to do is ride it. Congratulations. You just orchestrated a group ride out of a bunch of excuses, loose social guilt, and one guy named Tony who still hasn’t replied.
That’s 4D chess. Play on.
Sell the temperature-inversion lie
This tactic relies entirely on delivery. Speak with authority, keep your facts just vague enough to avoid questions, and bulldoze through any trace of doubt.
The premise is simple: a weather phenomenon called temperature inversion is in full effect. Cold air sinks into the valley, warm air rises above it. Which means, somehow, it’s actually warmer at a higher altitude.
Insist this is well-known among “serious riders”. Say the city traps the fog and the chill, while above 800 metres, the sun is blazing, the views are cinematic, and the trails are practically glowing. Visibility improves. Spirits lift. Your thermal layers become optional. The climb becomes salvation. Use phrases like “thermal inversion zone”, “sun shelf” or “altitude heater effect”. None of them mean anything, but they sound like they belong on a weather map, and that’s enough.
The beauty of this strategy is that it’s technically true – on rare occasions, and under very specific atmospheric conditions. Which you don’t need to get into because the only thing your mate needs to hear is that the sun is up there waiting for them. And if they want to feel it on their face, they’ll need to climb until their legs go numb.
Is it a trap? Of course it is. But it’s wrapped in sunlight, wrapped in science, and delivered with a straight face, and that’s enough to win you a riding buddy.
Lure them with the exotic allure of a snow ride
Forget mud. Mud is messy, ugly, heavy. Snow, on the other hand, is clean. Pristine. A minimalist winter canvas waiting to be shredded. And that’s how you sell it.
Call it a snow ride. Not a winter ride. Not a cold ride. A snow ride. Suddenly, it’s not about misery – it’s about adventure. It’s not a training session – it’s a rare opportunity. A once-a-season phenomenon. A chance to ride through silence, frost-covered trees, and soft trails that look like something out of a Scandinavian tourism ad.
You tell them it’s actually easier than mud. More consistent. Predictable even. It’s not, but that’s irrelevant. The trick is to undersell the risk while overselling the experience. Mention that it’s great for bike control. “Winter drift practice”, “powder laps” or “traction awareness training” all sound important enough to justify dragging someone through six inches of frozen chaos.
And if they hesitate, go visual. Snow rides look phenomenal on Strava. The tracks are perfect. The photos are dramatic. The suffering is hidden under a crisp white blanket. Nobody needs to know that underneath it all, you’re one bad lean away from testing your collarbone.
It’s exotic. It’s difficult. It’s absolutely miserable. But it looks amazing. And that’s enough.
Prove to them that indoor training is a lie
Finally, you can use the truth for a change. No subtle lies. No exaggerations. Just the pure truth about indoor training and its place. And the truth is, that its place just isn’t anywhere near actual riding.
This is your cleanest play yet. You don’t need to invent a temperature inversion or praise fictional riders. You just point out the obvious: sitting on a trainer is a great way to turn into a power-producing robot with the trail confidence of a chihuahua in a thunderstorm.
Don’t insult them directly – too obvious. Instead, ask if they’ve noticed their cornering feels off. Mention how you read that indoor training ruins reaction time. Say it’s not their fault. Say it happens to everyone. Then offer a solution that just happens to involve a ride you’re already planning.
Indeed, indoor cycling will never help you retain your confidence. It won’t give you the technique to survive wet roots or the agility to climb a loose path. These can be trained to perfection only where they occur naturally – on the trails, outside, where it happens to be wet and cold. But that doesn’t matter, because you’ll be warm in just 30 minutes, and you won’t drip all over your very, very expensive wooden floor. As His Holiness Jim Carrey once said in the film Liar, Liar: “The truth shall set you free.” Something more – it’ll guarantee you a ride buddy for the off-season.
A little lie never killed anybody… yet
Every winter ride begins with a lie.
It might be about the weather, the route, how long it’ll take or how “it’ll probably dry out by the time we hit the climb”. It doesn’t matter. The important thing is that it gets your mates out the door before their common sense kicks in.
Because, in the end, this isn’t about deception. It’s about preservation. Of fitness. Of friendship. Of those weird, chaotic group rides where nothing makes sense and yet somehow everything does. You’re not the villain here. You’re the enabler of bad decisions, made in good company, for questionable reasons. And in the darkest months of the year, that’s a noble cause.
So lie a little. Trick a lot. And keep the wheels turning. Otherwise, what are we supposed to do? Let winter rides die out? Yeah, that’s not happening.
