Water Torture

Rain has many types. You learn this as you ride to work every day. Broadly rain fits into two major families.

Rain on the way to work is the mother of all evil. It tortures you in every way and then saves up a little sting for the end of the day as well. You leave home stepping out from the warmth and the dry, only recently having given up the fight with the clock and dragged yourself out of your warm duvet, to find your worst fears have come true. The whoosh of car tyres across wet roads, and the insistent pounding of water falling are real and not just a way to make your bed feel softer and warmer. You’re in dry clothes and you linger in the doorway for as long as possible before launching yourself into the ride with a sigh.

For about three minutes you dare to believe that your outfit for the day has magically become waterproof as you stay warm and dry, but then reality hits. Damply. The first part of the torture is focussed behind you. Like a dam bursting, your shorts go from holding out the wet which is spraying from your back wheel to letting it all through. Like that moment you jump into a swimming pool which is never warm enough you gasp and shrink back, and then eventually accept it. Resigned to being wet in one place you press on, only for the evil rain to now attack on another front. This time it’s after your feet and has placed an unavoidable puddle or small stream crossing your path. Warm, content feet are shocked into sodden, freezing parts of your body you’d rather be without. Every up and down pedal stroke moves the water between your toes and riding fast just cools them down further in the wind-chill. Once again you accept your fate and press on. In many ways you’ve faced the worst of it so far. You certainly have if your journey is short and you’re not going to suffer from the shivering chills of being wet for too long in the wind. You shake the rain from your helmet when it gets too much, adjust the brakes, which are being dissolved like a paracetamol stuck to the roof of your mouth and press on. The rest of you is wet but bearable, whether you’ve adopted the layer-up-with-waterproofs, or the skin-is-mostly-waterproof method. You’re even settling into it, feeling like rain’s ok. But then you’re pleased to make it to work and peel off the wet clothes, and tug on dry ones over wet legs and arms, and then try not to drip too much on your keyboard.

But here’s where rain on the way to work has its real evil. At the end of the day everything is still wet, and now colder as it’s lost your body heat. You have to drag wet clothes on over parts of your body which don’t love the wet and the cold and then find enthusiasm for getting back on the bike. Feeling cold water squeezed out of various bits of your clothing and running on your skin which has got used to being warm and dry is not the best start to a journey home. In fact it’s enough to make you give up and go to the pub, or sleep at work. If you’re lucky you managed to forget it during the day. If not it played on your mind all the time you were at work and psychologically destroyed you.

The other family of rain likes to get you on your way home. It’s no better, especially if you’re wet already, but it’s a reminder of how you’re somehow more human than the cars swishing past you. And your duvet’s waiting when you get through the door, and there’s something satisfying about warming up in a shower as the water runs grey with the road muck you picked up on your legs. There’s also probably something nice in the freezer that’ll be warming you inside in 25 minutes at gas mark 6.

Mind you, I still don’t know which is worse, rain or wind.

PS. Mudguards are for pansies (and people who like to keep dry.)

A