I spent the entire winter doing morning Spanish Interval Sessions, wherein one dons all their winter riding kit (including wooly hat) before climbing aboard the turbo in a hopeless attempt to sweat themselves thin. The flaw in the method is less in its commitment and more in its lack of effectiveness, although the magnitude of the commitment feels a lot like effectiveness when you’re doing it. The irony is that the Spanish do it in an attempt to shed the water weight caused by the bloating effect of cortisone whereas I did it in an attempt to shed the weight caused by the effect of things like “food” and “alcohol”.

Unlike those wealthy Spanish riders and their fancy turbos, everyone knows that in Belgium¹, they can’t afford such luxuries. So instead of sitting in the basement sweat box to shed water weight, those poor Flemish riders are forced to wrap themselves in sleeping bags and Himalayan mountaineering mitts and set out on the snowy roads in order to break a sweat.

¹ I am guessing that these fellows are in fact Belgian. They could be any nationality, but “Belgian” feels right.