Kyle Yost

Click here for Picture and Video of Week 3 in Majorca.

The entire impetus for my month of cycling in Europe was a cycling reunion with my friend and training partner, Amy Smith, who moved last summer to England. She arranged a week in Majorca, and I and eight others from the DC area jumped at the chance to reunite with Amy in the cyclist’s paradise of Majorca and to relive the misery of Amy dropping the hammer at the end of a long ride and putting you into a world of hurt. It was Amy with whom I rode 182 miles from Washington, DC to Deep Creek Lake, MD last summer, and who thought that was so much fun that she wanted to ride back home the next day.

In hindsight it seems so obvious. Why on earth I had it in my mind as I arrived in Majorca that I was in for a relaxing week of casual riding and excessive sangria drinking I do not know. I would be riding with Amy. This would be no recovery week. I should have known what was coming my way.


Majorca has to be seen to be believed. I had heard stories that it is cycling heaven and even heard from a non-cyclist friend who had just returned that “cyclists have taken over the island”. My first sense that this place might indeed be an island oasis for cyclists occurred in the small Majorcan airport. Bike boxes were everywhere. People were assembling bikes and disassembling bikes in the terminal. There was more traffic at the oversized baggage claim gathering bike boxes than there was at the regular baggage claim. We crammed six bike boxes and the rest of our luggage into our van and headed across the island to our villa, getting excited by the handfuls of cyclists we spotted on occasion along the way. If we only knew what was to come….

Sometimes it’s better to be lucky than good, and on this trip we certainly had our fair share of luck. Our first strike of good fortune occurred the first evening and indeed set us up for rides for the entire week. We were wandering the town of Puerto Pollensa looking for some place open for an early dinner (7pm is before the early bird special in Spain), when we spotted an Irish pub down a side street that looked open. What do you know, but directly across the street from the pub was a bike shop so naturally we wandered in to take a gander at the wares. There we met Gary Smith, the retired owner of Evans Cycles, the UK’s version of Performance Bikes, and Bruce Griffiths, the owner of the shop, Pro Cycle Hire. These contacts would prove very helpful throughout the week. But, most importantly we learned to just show up every morning at 9:15am in front of Tolo’s Restaurant where the locals gather to ride. I’m sure it is impossible to have a bad ride in Majorca, but had we been left to follow maps and navigate for ourselves we most certainly would have ended up on relatively major roads and not fully experienced the backroad alleys and farm paths that we were led down by the locals.

It is impossible to adequately describe how incredible the riding in Majorca is, so I’ll let my pictures and video do the talking.


If I had to imagine what heaven for a cyclist would be, I would likely describe Majorca. Cyclists have indeed taken over the island. Cars are second class citizens and they know it. When you approach an intersection you slow as much to look out for a crossing peloton as to look out for a crossing car. Unlike in Girona, where you knew it if you crossed paths with a pro team, in Majorca you’d never realize it as they would blend in with the tens of thousands of other cyclists on the roads. Though we did bump into Sean Kelly one day at a lunch stop. The weather was ideal; the first 3 days we had cloud cover and experienced maybe one hour of drizzles. The remainder of the week was splendid sunshine and shorts and short sleeve jersey weather. The island offers up any kind of riding you desire, flat, country roads, gradual climbs, or legitimate mountains with steep, switchback climbs overlooking cliffs to the Mediterranean below.

Every ride was memorable and noteworthy, but two I will remember for a long time. The first is the climb up the Puiz Major, the highest point on the island. The climb starts at the beach in Port de Soller and climbs 1000 meters in 9 miles. We had been told that one hour is considered the benchmark of a good time and that Jan Ullrich and the T*Mobile team do repeats up the climb in roughly 40 minutes. So, with one hour on the brain and knowing I had done longer climbs the previous two weeks I found a pace I thought I could maintain for an hour. After about 45 minutes I was starting to suffer but also starting to think that I was some kind of stud. For 45 minutes I had been passing a constant stream of riders, many of whom had ripped calves and looked like legitimate cyclists, and I had not been passed even once. Just like when going up the Le Turo d’leHomme the previous week I was in need of a good dose of humility and would shortly receive it. I didn’t just get passed, a blur of muscle and blue jersey shot by me like he was on a motorcycle. And, once again I have it all on video so I can relive my dressing down when I again get too big for my britches. Presumably this guy knew the summit of the climb was only two switchbacks away and was sprinting for the top, but regardless my piece of humble pie had been served. Put in place I continued up the hill catching a few more riders and summitted in 52 minutes. Proud of myself and ready to bask in my domination of the hour threshold, Amy rolled over the top only moments later in 55 minutes, a time that was the talk of the locals crowd that evening at Tolo’s.

While the climb from sea level to the highest point on the island was amazing and memorable, by far and away the highlight of the trip was La Colabra. This climb goes from sea level to 800 meters in only 6 miles, but what really makes it memorable is the road itself. We had been told that this is the only hors categorie (beyond categorization) climb on the island, but I’m skeptical that it is indeed an HC climb as Le Turo d’leHomme outside Girona is a Cat 1 climb and definitely harder. The road is 6 miles of ridiculously snaking switchbacks that essentially make their way straight up a cliff. The descent was fun but a bit hairy with the super tight turns requiring a slow speed and steady bike handling. It is definitely worth checking out the pictures and videos of the Colabra descent. After riding the descent and having heard all the hype of La Colabra we were pretty intimidated by the climb, but in reality it wasn’t as hard as anticipated. It took me 39 minutes and Amy 42, and both of us were in agreement that we took it a little too conservatively initially as the climb turned out not to be as difficult as we had feared, and agreed the climb up Puiz Major was more difficult.