You got fitter and your back got worse, and those two facts are related.

Here's the thing nobody wants to hear, and I say it as someone who has ridden a great deal and enjoyed all of it: the position you adopt on a road bike is not enormously different from the position you adopt at a desk.

Hips flexed. Trunk forward. Shoulders reaching. Head lifted against the whole arrangement so you can see where you're going. If you spend the working day in that shape and then choose it again as recreation, you have found a way to spend ten hours in one posture and call half of it exercise.

The muscular version is that the hip flexors and the front of the chest spend all that time shortened, the glutes and the back of the shoulder spend it lengthened and largely unrecruited, and the pedal stroke itself tends to become quad-dominant — pushing down hard, and doing much less through the back half of the circle. That last one is the piece riders most often don't know about themselves.

Road and mountain are genuinely different problems, though, and it's worth splitting them. Road is a duration problem: one position, held for hours, with the load almost entirely predictable. Mountain is an impact and reaction problem: constant changes of direction, absorbing terrain through the arms and legs, and repeated short efforts out of the saddle. A rider who does both has two separate demands and usually one set of preparation, which is normally none.

The specifics: low back pain on the bike, power on the road, and conditioning for the trail.

A 60-minute assessment first — history, what's been tried, whether you've had a proper fit done, and what your riding week actually is rather than what you'd like it to be. Then we test hip range, trunk control and what your back tolerates in the positions cycling puts you in, off the bike, where I can change one variable at a time.

Then one-on-one sessions of 45 to 60 minutes with me at the studio on Glenarm Place. The work is mostly upright and mostly loaded, which is the direct opposite of what you've spent your season doing — that's rather the point.

One honest note. If you haven't had a professional bike fit, get one before you spend money with me. It solves a real category of problem faster and cheaper than I will, and I would rather tell you that now than take six sessions to arrive at it.

So the fitness didn't cause the problem — it extended the window in which the problem could happen. And the recreation you chose to escape the desk is, from your hips' point of view, more desk.

I appreciate that is not what anyone wants read back to them about a bike they saved up for. Anyway. You know it now.