This is what life must be like for the Spice Girls. Crowds of young kids, mainly girls, line the streets and scream their lungs out in welcome as we whirl past at high speed. If only my inner thighs would stop spasming and my backside stop feeling as if somebody had spent a week rubbing it with heavy-duty sandpaper, I could sit back and enjoy the adulation.
That's the problem with going on a hardcore biking adventure through Morocco's Anti-Atlas and Atlas mountains. There comes a time when you're just going to have to accept that your body is going to hurt. Lots. For a long time. That's why you have to make the most of the good bits.
And best of all was screaming down through rocky, narrow donkey tracks, 100 ft (30 metres) drop-offs to one side, into tiny Berber villages that look abandoned from a distance but suddenly burst into life as the first helmeted, fluorescent-clothed bikers pass through. At the front of the procession, a chunkily-built local eases our passage through the throng, while our young team leader, Bas, watches our backs from the rear of the line.
There's barely time to yell "Bonjour" in answer to the children's greetings before you have left the village and hit the track again. As Bas pointed out, bikers are probably the only outsiders most of them see from one year to the next.
The puzzled gaze from the adults betrayed their inner thoughts: why the hell are these people working so hard when they could just sit on a donkey and enjoy the ride? The trip was littered with such moments. Starting in the beach resort of Agadir, we travelled for six days in a 275 km figure of eight down through the Anti-Atlas range and then back up into the Atlas proper, before heading back to Agadir for a long overdue drinking session and our flights home.
This is some of the best biking country on the planet: long, fast descents on hard-packed trails; rocky climbs, which make you feel like death on the way up but which more than reward survival at the top with another stunning view. No surprise, then, when Bas opened his arms to the heavens on the first day and - still pedalling - declared: "Welcome to my office."
The landscape varies not just from day to day, but from hour to hour. Riding across flat, sandy land, you suddenly find yourself at the edge of a lush valley, or approaching a surreal, lunar rock formation, or entering a tiny fortified Berber village, where the people have somehow managed to carve neat terraces beneath the noses of the massive, wild peaks which dominate the skyline.
This is a land to be savoured no matter what the mode of transport. We met dozens of coach and Land Rover tours. But it would be tough to beat the bike. Gliding along on two knobbly wheels and some clever aluminium, people stop being mere tourists or sightseers. They meld into the landscape, feeling, through every muscle, the scale of what nature has achieved.
Officially, the trip is called the Atlas Descent because 70 per cent of it is downhill. But don't be fooled - 30 per cent uphill equals a surprising amount of climbing. And sometimes in temperatures of 30 degrees Centigrade - even though the tour only runs in the cooler months. If there is one word of Arabic that burns its way into the memory on this trip, it is "Yallah": politely translated as "Let's go", but on the lips of our local guide, Abdullah, this sounded unmistakably like "Shift your lazy arse".
At least I didn't suffer alone. After the first killer climb on the first day - immediately after lunch - most of the group realised we were all in this together. From then on, a kind of Blitz spirit prevailed, as we compared exhaustion statistics and feted those who had battled to the top without succumbing to the temptation of one of the ever-present support Land Rovers.
Because the trip is not just for the full-on bike nut. The individuals in our group were as varied in their ability as they were in their professions and backgrounds: a pharmacist from Bournemouth, a City trader from Australia, even an expert in honey production from New Zealand. Riding is done at your own pace (hence the two guides front and rear) with regular stops for water, sustenance or just to take in the scenery. Shared rooms added to the sense of communal struggle.
And there was always the soft option of using one of the three Land Rovers, which chugged along behind at a discreet distance from the tail-enders. When it all got too much, the bike was tossed on top while a suffering rider went through a heart-stopping ordeal of an entirely different kind, courtesy of one of the jocularly homicidal drivers.
The trick was to keep remembering that they were not mad, they were just treating those nauseating mountain S-bends with the dismissive contempt they deserved. When I couldn't forgive them even that, I forced myself to focus instead on their remarkable ability to produce unfeasibly large and delicious picnic lunches from beneath the piles of bandages and bike spares in the back.
But after the first day, the soft option was rarely taken. Legs, arms and hearts soon become accustomed to the strain. A pleasant numbness replaces actual pain. The riding was so good, the terrain so other worldly that nobody wanted to experience it from behind a windscreen. Take Mike, who refused to accept chauffeur-driven transport even after a nasty high-speed crash on the second day left him with a badly-cut eye.
The finale was a 1,700 metre descent over 40 km along the Tizi Trail. Starting at the peak of the Tizi-n-Test, one of the highest road passes in North Africa, the trail is the ultimate in High Atlas biking. Fast, precarious piste, rising and falling through huge mountains, small river fords and those Berber villages. Sharp turns concealed a wealth of potential dangers: a sheer cliff drop, overhanging thorn bushes, a group of shrieking children or a stubborn cow refusing to yield to the cyclists.
There were tumbles and punctures, more than a few gashes and scratches. Long-forgotten muscle groups decided they had had enough. But the enormous adrenaline-fuelled grins on every face at the bottom as we toasted our survival with lukewarm lagers, told the real story. This was pure, unmissable adventure. London's Richmond Park just wouldn't cut it any more.