The bike makes everything better

So for the past couple of days my lower back has been really sore. Strangely enough I cannot figure out why this is, normally I'm obsessive about my body and I know the reason or cause for even the most minor aliment. So it is somewhat surprising that my back is sore enough for me to feel as though I'm an 80 year-old with severe arthritis when I try to get up from a seated position.

Even once I'm up I'm not done looking as though I'm nearing my deathbed. All day at work if I had to get up to leave my office I would take a few steps around my office before leaving. Otherwise I would have had to shuffle down the hall for the first little way. That's not all that bad normally, but the location of my back pain was such that I'm sure an onlooker would have thought that I was seriously clenching and trying not to crap my pants.

So despite all my joys of lower back pain I did notice one thing today, my back really doesn't hurt much at all on the bike. My ride to and from work were probably the most comfortable parts of my day, despite the fact that I'm doing it with a nearly 20 pound backpack resting on my lower back. Now if I could ride my bike everywhere around the building and labs I'd be able to move around pain free and not look weird at all!

When I used to do a lot of bike racing I was always surprised at the number of people who had sore backs when riding. For some reason my back almost never got sore, even after 40 km time trials. Actually I don't think it's anything special with me, maybe just a matter of better fit on the bike, because when you look at how the spine is made we really should be more comfortable on a bike. When riding we are supporting our weight not only at the base of our spine but also at the top, our arms help hold our head/shoulders up. This is far more similar to traditional mammalian posture, which is what our spine was originally evolved to cope with. Which explains why my lower back pain is minimized when I'm on the bike in a position that reduces the pressure on my spine. When you think about it, this is just more proof that there is no "intelligent designer" because nobody who knows anything about physiology would have made a spine like our for bipeds like us.