Why Exercise Is a Miracle Drug

I don’t think it’s unique to bikes - lots of people have the same/similar feelings from other forms of exercise. There’s a runners high too. I used to row in university, and there was no better feeling (to me) than being in the middle of a lake in a tiny boat and clocking in 16/20k on a crisp winters morning.

Riding a bike lifts my mood certainly but it doesn't let me experience my neighborhood. I zoom past the neighborhood and at 15mph you can hardly experience it. You might have some vague ideas about architectural styles in the neighborhood but that's it. If the neighborhood has shops, you can't easily visit them without first parking the bike. You need to walk to really experience a neighborhood.

Have you tried eating a snack after? Maybe you're hangry

> i've tried lots of different forms of exercise

Have they all been in a gym environment? If so, it could be the reason. Going to the gym in the winter, I do get the benefits but it doesn't do as much for my mood as sports outdoors when the weather is nice.

I like drinking while I'm doing it, and not after I've done it, but exercise is the other way around.

(OK only some exercise, and usually I already like it while I'm doing it, I just don't want to go out to do it.)

I don't drink in my spare time , but I can understand you comment and :)

I exercise drinking

I had flat feet most of my life, until I started a 5x per week yoga practice (ashtanga based). One day about a year into it I noticed that I had defined arches, something I hadn’t expected at all. All those one leg standing balancing poses really develops your ankles, knees, and feet.

Some years later when I started running with typical arch supporting running shoes, picked out for me at a specialty running store where they record your stride etc, I developed pretty bad plantar fasciitis as soon as I started hitting 8k on my runs. Swapped them out for zero drop Altras and I haven’t had issues since.

All that is to say our feet are pretty well designed as long as you give it the strengthening it needs. You should take care of your feet, but not coddle them, is how I’ve come to view it.

My wife's a podiatrist. I can conjure what I've heard her tell a thousand people over the years: invest in arch supports. Shoot for the ones that run about $50 and are rigid. Don't start with the $500 custom ones, and skip the $10 soft ones you see at the pharmacy. Go to REI or a running shop or a sporting goods store and get those instead.

My knees freaking killed me when I was running. I started using the supports my wife bought for me and it instantly improved, and far beyond any placebo effect. Before: my knees ached after I ran 100% of the time. Now: they never ache anymore.

My friend has fixed his flat feet by focusing on yoga poses that engage the “knife edge” of his feet (ie: the outside). It took some time but he reckons it’s very noticeable. Maybe worth a try?

I’ve read in a few places that the flat feet comes from wearing shoes that don’t allow your toes to splay, which causes the muscles that create the arch to atrophy. Not a scientist and have never had flat feet, so can’t confirm, but I recently started wearing zero drop shoes and definitely feel a healthy soreness as my feet get stronger.

Nobody claimed we are intelligently designed.

Evolution is not perfect. We are still better at running long distances for long stretches of time than any other animal.

Flat feet are often a problem of foot muscles and posture. Physiotherapy and strengthening your feet can most likely work wonders even if your family has genetic predisposition for the problem.

Most energy used for any work (in the physics sense) ends up as heat, eventually.

I mean, would you prefer we add in some evolutionary pressure?

Note also that there are numerous champion runners with flat feet.

There is actually some evidence that, in a sprint, humans might be able to run faster on all 4 limbs than on 2

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27446911/

It's a tradeoff. Having two general purpose limbs is useful for all sorts of things, but not escaping scary things, so endurance can somewhat make up for that.

Have you ever went running with a dog? Dogs can go fast over a short distance but they overheat quickly. People just keep on running way past the time the dog has collapsed.

This is not an obscure theory, it's called the "Endurance running hypothesis" [1], and it does seem that humans are one of very few species exceptionally well-adapted to very long-distance running (though dogs and wolves are another one). The idea is that ancient hominids in Africa practiced "persistence hunting"[2], where they would hunt e.g. antelopes and similar species by repeatedly chasing them down. The prey would sprint off when humans got close, but doing this repeatedly causes the animal to exhaust their energy or die of heat stroke, humans being much better adapted to running for many hours on end (this kind of hunting is known to happen to this day). It's plausible that persistence hunting also contributed to evolving our other super-powers, as it requires good spatial awareness, tool-use and communication.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_running_hypothesis

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persistence_hunting

This is specifically about long distance running, where basically no animal can keep up.

A key hunan advantage was persistence hunting - track and run after a deer (or similar) prey. Tgey can burst outrun the human, burt hemshe keeps on running, eventually, often after double-digit kilometers, the human can just trot up to the exhausted nimal and kill it. That's what the tendons and evaporative cooling do.

There's a famous Uktramarathon race, iirc, the Western States 100, 100 miles in the Sierra mountains that was a horse race, until some people started running without the horse, and winning.

This is a gross simplification on both accounts.

US Army veterans do have a higher rate of arthritis but their days are quite different from the "run 3-5 days a week" that most people think of when talking about recreational runners.

And the pacemaker comment stood out so I did a bit of digging and found a study [1] you might be referring to. Again, the effects were strong only in the heavy-duty-exercisers/pro/semi-pro cross-country skiier group. Additionally, this didn't offset the gains to cardiovascular or mortality risk - that group was still "healthier."

[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/39101218/

People in the army are also regularly carrying an extra 50 pound ruck, 25 pounds of body armor, and enough other various and sundry items to add up to about 100+ lbs of total kit. That's probably what's destroying people's knees more than the running by itself

It's more that the military's goal isn't to produce adults that are indefinitely healthy, but rather a robust geopolitical deterrent that only requires its employees to be physical capable for about twenty years, after which their service life is over. Running is not the issue. Even a car designed for driving can be driven irresponsibly.

I can’t be sure, but my impression is that army drills (1) push uniformly (rather than let you improve at your own pace) and (2) often involve carrying your kit, which is 20-40lbs. Neither of these is similar to the kind of running GP describes, namely unburdened, at a comfortable speed, over ~arbitrary distances.

I was going to say, I don't believe that sitting on a chair for 40 hours a week is great but I've also never seen so many wounded and disabled people than with people heavily into sports.

Army personnel in general is unnaturally beefy and I'm sure these running drills often are done carrying load, no?

Humans are evolved to run, but not to have heavy frames and not carrying material for fighting wars.

Hm, I'm skeptical. I think the data might be a little equivocal on that one.

I'm also part of the barefoot running army and tend to think that the braking forces from shoes have a role to play in knee problems (I personally stopped having them when I started running barefoot so that's where my bias comes from.)

I guess there are a lot of confounding variables in there, having taken up running a few years ago my resting heart rate is very low, and I'm far more aware of it than a non-runner. I suppose folks with a family history of heart problems may take up exercise to try and get ahead of it too.

True, but if you can afford to hike in the mountains, you can then brag about seeing a groundhog, a chamois, a valley, joining paths, waking up with the sun (never hike in afternoons because storms and night approaching).

Which is the best of both worlds: You don’t index yourself against an herculean performance, and yet you still do exercise. And walking 8hrs in the mountains actually does wonders to weight, MUCH better than my herculean 1000m-in-70-minutes climb.

I walk every morning and hit 80-80% of my max heart rate for parts of it. Walking can be quite good exercise, unless you live somewhere very flat. My V02 max continues to climb steadily 0.1/week like clockwork, and no running yet. Granted, it's got a ways to go, it's just barely above average, but still, walking is working.

I think you might've misunderstood the parent comment. Yoga is exercise, no one doubts that, but it specifically is not aerobic exercise (like running) and it is not weight lifting (like gym).

Hiit yoga too. Also in a hot room too.

Most non-freelance software development I’ve done has been a group effort.

I’ve met a lot of my gym partners, biking friends, and climbing friends through software work.

Or taking up any white collar job! There's a reason I spend a lot of my free time swimming and hiking.

This is an interesting comment because I've lived a lot of sides of this.

At my first job (where I kinda 'weaseled' my way into doing software vs my job title) it was an incredibly collaborative experience. It started with finding ways to make tools that helped my colleagues do monotonous tasks faster. Which then evolved into fun dialogue. "Hey can you make a button to do X" and we'd get to talk about it, I'd hack the feature together, hit publish and wait for the team to give feedback. "Oh I got this error" I'd get up and walk over. It wasn't perfect but I was never lonely and only as still as I wanted to be.

At my second gig, It started a little lonely but thankfully the culture was just laid back enough I got to socialize (thankfully it was a shop full of fun and interesting people!).

Third gig, Uggh it was very 'heads down' for most of my time there, nobody liked small talk except the conspiracy theory guy. I learned a lot about what I did and didn't like in company culture there. It did get a little better before I left...

Fourth gig was a dream. It was the second place where I didn't just get to collaborate with my team, but the first place where it was a lot of software engineers. We even had a teams room for nothing but sharing music and it was always heartwarming to see a reply to some obscure tune and someone would reply with something that yes you would absolutely appreciate given what you originally posted. And it was hectic enough that I did get a reputation for being a 'floor runner'.

Fifth Gig... well it was 100% remote. And in fact one day I was so focused on a problem I sat in the wrong position too long and permanently fucked up my left ulnar nerve... But that was such a good group, and Ironically I was able to -take- the lessons from #4 and #2 and turned them into traditions that stuck around even after I left (hell even after they fired everyone, we kept doing the 'game night' for a while...)

Won't say anything about my current place, that's all still a work in progress <_<

No, they mitigate this by getting paid a lot of money.

Haha.. ouch.

There were no restrictions on running or biking in the pandemic. Quite the opposite. Because indoor entertainment venues like bars weren't available, I saw way more people embracing the outdoors.

30-60 minutes pushing a lawn mower is good low-impact exercise. Riding around on a lawn tractor with a beer, not so much.