Rain Ride

I got caught in a pretty good (pretty bad?) downpour on the way to school this morning. Fortunately, I had my rain jacket, pants, and booties; unfortunately, I didn’t have my helmet cover. My body stayed relatively undrenched, but my head was soaked when I got to the office. A student in the bathroom looked quite askance at me as I dried my hair with paper towels.

I actually like riding in the rain. For one thing, it keeps the riff-raff out and allows me to feel especially smug about being a fulltime bike commuter. For another, I love gliding across the freeway overpass and seeing miles of cars stacked up in rainy-day traffic.

I also like the sounds: the pitter-patter of raindrops on my helmet, the squish-squish of tires over the wet road, the shiver of me timbers as rivulets of waters roll down my neck and back.

It also seems that I go a wee bit faster in the wet; perhaps there’s less rolling resistance or something, or maybe I just ride more quickly to get out of the rain.

There are two main things I don’t like about cycling on rainy days. First, I get tired of all the dressing and undressing: gearing up to head out, stripping off the soaked stuff when I arrive. Lots of times, we get these intermittent showers; invariably, I’m either under-geared or over-geared at the outset of the ride; just as invariably, as soon as I put on my wet weather togs, the rain stops and as soon as I take them off, it starts again.

Second, especially, as winter wears on, I get tired of the soggy cheese smell that all my gear, especially my gloves, takes on. Sometimes, I’ll be sitting at my desk and I keep getting whiffs of limburger; it’s only when I take out my lunchtime cheddar cheese sandwich that I realize it’s been my own moldy fingers I’ve been smelling all along.