Riding a bike up a steep hill, lightly hungover, my heart attempting to leave my chest, wondering where the nearest hospital was, I found myself with reason to curse the famous disc jockey Pete Tong. This was all his idea.
To explain, I bumped into Pete Tong in a nightclub last year. (For some reason, you have to write both of his names for either to make sense; he can’t be only “Pete” or “Tong”.) We’d met before, through a piece I wrote about dance music, but there he was again, minding his own business, listening to music with his wife. We got chatting.
One of the remarkable things about Pete Tong is that he’s 64 years old and he looks fantastic, which is some feat for a man who has kept strange hours for most of the past 45 years. (He was DJing before house music began, which makes my head spin right round.) Anyway, I think I may have asked him the secret of his eternal youth at about two in the morning. Pete Tong told me: he loves to cycle. And then he mentioned a four-day cycling and music weekend he helped to organise, in Ibiza, in October—something called the LeBlanq Joyride Festival. People ride bikes in the day; DJs play music at night. The island has emptied out its clubbers by mid-October, and the weather is still gorgeous. I should come, he said.
Most ideas you have in nightclubs at 2am don’t survive the dawn, but this one did. I was as surprised as anyone. I’m not a cyclist. I recently bought a cheap second-hand road bike to help with the school commute. It came with those special pedals you have to clip into, so I bought a pair of daft shoes on Amazon to go with them and some grotesque Lycra shorts. As the Ibiza weekend loomed, I thought I might need some practice, and so a keen cyclist friend took me out on a ride. We were gone for five hours, which is a long time to do anything. When I stopped at a junction near the end, I was so exhausted that I didn’t have the energy to unclip myself and simply fell sideways onto the pavement, still attached to my bike, like a toppled statue.
I bought a pair of daft shoes on Amazon and some grotesque Lycra shorts
The omens were not good, then. In the way of things you wish you hadn’t agreed to, I gave the cycling weekend almost no more thought. Then, suddenly, it was upon me, and I was at Ibiza airport, and there was no backing out. There were several things I hadn’t fully appreciated about the event. First, there were about 400 other people flying in for the weekend, a number of whom had extremely low body-mass indices. Some had come from Japan and Russia and Canada. A few had arrived by private jet. Second, there would be professional bike riders guiding the cyclists—actual athletes who had won stages of the Tour de France—and one, Kasia Niewiadoma, who actually won the last women’s Tour de France. Third, and perhaps most worryingly, almost everyone seemed to have brought their own bike, disassembled, in a special box. It would have been laughable to fly my three-hundred-quid bike to Ibiza, so I borrowed one out there. In the build-up to the event, the bike-rental people asked me to bring my own pedals. I had to watch two YouTube videos to work out how to take them off.
Still, all I had to do was survive a few days of exercise in a pleasant setting. The kind woman who took my name at registration at the hotel said that she would put me in the slowest group for the gentle introductory ride on the first night. I said that would be fine. I discovered that for the next day, I was on a 62km route, which was the shortest available, and still seemed quite a long way. (You could ride double that distance if you were so minded, which many people were.)
In the event, the bike riding proved not to be too bad at all, particularly on those first couple of days. I didn’t fall off. Pete Tong’s late-night sales pitch proved accurate. Ibiza is an island of absurd beauty: bougainvillea on whitewashed houses; crickets chirping in the pine forests; a cobalt sea washing against the rocks. In mid-October, away from the oontz oontz of the summer bacchanals, the roads are quiet, the beaches deserted, and the sun is still shining. Moreover, the other guests were almost uniformly delightful. Some were serious about their cycling, but others were just happy to be in a pleasant place, away from work, with a new view and some sweat on their brow. One group did no cycling at all and spent their days doing yoga, hiking and breathwork.
By the third morning, the breathwork option was looking quite attractive. The festival was a curious combination of pleasures. In the evenings, a bunch of saddle-sore people, mostly in early middle-age, were shipped to the gardens of a five-star hotel where a mini festival site had been constructed. (It was also where the celebrities and the private-jet people were staying.) Pete Tong played. Rudimental played. At some point, for reasons I still don’t quite understand, Andrew Ridgeley of Wham! turned up, with a tan like varnish. There was a lot of alcohol. On the Friday night, my spirits were high. At one point, I had an Old Fashioned in each hand. There was an after-party at the hotel’s own nightclub, DJ-ed by Taylor Phinney, an affable American cyclist.
A few hours later, I was back in the saddle, sweating whisky, and regretting some of the choices I had made. Adam Blythe, a former champion road racer, was on our ride. His bike was sprayed gold. I could hardly speak to him as he pulled alongside for a chat. By mid-morning, I thought I had fixed the hangover, but then came the steepest hill—the one where I cursed the day I ever met the fresh-faced DJ and asked him the secret of eternal youth. My mood wasn’t helped when, halfway through that infernal climb, legs in agony and lungs screaming, Kasia Niewiadoma flew past me. I know that she had recently won the Tour de France, and therefore was probably in decent shape, but she was barely out of breath. Truly, professional athletes are a different species. She shot me a bright-white smile, told me I was nearly there (I wasn’t), hit the top a minute later, descended the whole climb, and immediately scaled it again, just for fun.
And where, you may ask, was Pete Tong? Just behind me, it turned out. He reached the apex of that monstrous incline slightly after I did, caught my eye and uttered the word “fucked”. It was decent of him; I thought he looked fine. Indeed, later that night, he not only headlined a set, but also DJed an after-party, too—a bourbon on ice as his recovery drink of choice—finishing only when the lights went up in the early hours: a very different kind of endurance athlete.
