Do you really cycle?” asked the Californian life coach sitting at the table next to me. We were at a restaurant called Bacchus, eating clever, foam-covered, Michelin-starred food and drinking conversation-starter Mallorcan wines.

I was sporting heels that I’d crammed into the side pockets of my backpack, and I had been banging on about my plans for a cycling holiday.

“Yes, I do really cycle,” I said, sounding a little prickly. “Do you?”

He pulled up a trouser leg to show me an expanse of hair-free calf. He was a cycling nut, that money- and testosterone-drenched breed of urban professional male who takes his amateur cycling very seriously.

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He had flown all the way here because: “I wanted to be able to ride mountains and small towns, and stay in a real nice hotel.”

And here we were, indeed, in a real nice hotel - one of the real nicest on the island - just two of the 90,000 and counting who visit the island to ride every year.

“Do you really?” asked the convivial owner of the hotel, a retired lawyer and antiques fanatic called Vivien Read. “Yes. I. Do.” I said, rudely.

In fact, it was the only reason I had checked into his fancy five-star hotel. It had recently opened a small but well-equipped “luxury” cycling centre, with carbon-frame Giant road bikes to hire for £29 a day. And it had a spa: all the better, I figured, to relax my hard-worked muscles.

But my first day had left me wondering if I was, indeed, a cyclist. I didn’t look like the average cyclist you see racing down Mallorcan roads: fanatical, wiry, male, tightly bound in club colours and Lycra. Most cycle tourism sees clubs and teams coming out and bunking up somewhere cheap.

None of them was riding in a bikini top with their shorts hitched up as high as they would go. This was bad etiquette: proper cyclists aren’t supposed to care about bizarre tan marks.

The next day, I rode with the cycle centre’s manager, Malcolm, and the life coach, who was taking it easy because he had flu, so he figured I’d not slow the pace too annoyingly. We attacked a couple of middle-sized mountain roads, wheeled through pretty old villages such as Alaro and Orient, and stopped for coffee and a cigarette (only me) in Bunyola.

It was the hardest riding I’d ever done - and the best. By the time we finished our second climb, I was in endorphin-induced heaven, the views over the medicinal- and oily-smelling mountain forests ambrosia for the eyes and nose.

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