I rode my bike to work the other day in a deluge. I’m not sure exactly what the definition of “deluge” is, but as in the famous quote about pornography, I know it when I see it. It was raining hard.
I had started preparing for rain rides – I put fenders on the bike – and I had been thinking, “maybe I need some different clothes for riding in the rain”, but I hadn’t actually done anything. Then it was Monday morning and it was pouring.
To make a long, boring story short and.. well, short, I wore rain pants and a rain jacket, packed my scrubs in a trash compactor bag ( an old bike touring trick; trash compactor bags are really strong, water tight and cheap) and arrived at work dry. It actually wasn’t very hard.
My goal with this post isn’t, however, to convince people that riding in the rain is easy, but rather rarely necessary. So even if you choose to drive when it’s raining you should be able to ride most of the time. I haven’t driven my car to work since I moved into town in June and I’d like to keep that record intact, so I will sometimes have to ride in the rain. But how often?
This graph shows that we get very little rain in the summer and gives the impression that it rains a lot in the winter. Which is kind of true, but of course, even during the rainy months, most of the time it isn’t raining. We have an average rainfall of 2.57 inches in October and I rode in really wet rain three times and light drizzle once. I guesstimate that I average three times on my bike a day, so a little over 4 percent of my October rides were in the rain. I can ride with that.
One of my colleagues referred to me as an “extremist” after seeing me on my deluge ride. I don’t see myself that way, maybe a bit obsessive-compulsive…
Anyway, not in an “extremist” way, but just in a mildly OCD way, I got a calendar to log how often I have to ride in the rain this winter (I started to create an excel spread sheet so I could have the stats compute automatically and create graphs… then caught myself, breathed deeply, and reminded myself that I am not sick in my mind and that a pencil and paper is perfectly adequate).
I’ll keep you posted, probably a once a month post on my average rain rides per month. I think we’ll discover that doing the 2MC through the winter isn’t an “extremist” thing. I’ll keep you posted but I don’t want you to obsess over it, I’ll take care of that.
