It Hardly Ever Rains
If you were to look at the official stats, you’d think that riding to work was either too cold, too hot, or often, too wet:
Look at this month - on average, we can expect almost ten rainy days! The truth of this is of course a little different. Take today for example…
- Weather forecast was for showers all morning, then heavy rain from about 6pm - just the time that I’d be riding home. Oh, and a middling south-easterly headwind for that ride home too.
- What to do? I really don’t enjoy getting wet, so maybe I should drive? But I do also enjoy riding . . .
- So I rode - much to everyone’s amusement at the office. They were expecting to see me leaving for home complete with a snorkel again.
- But the weather here is funny and highly changeable. So mid-afternoon we had a couple of monsoon-grade showers. Then as I was leaving the sky was looking slate grey all around. I called Wife to let her know what time I’d be home, and she told me that it was raining pretty hard in Whitley Bay…
- But despite all this, the ride home was dry, and the sun even came out for the last couple of miles.
This is fairly typical - it might rain for an average of ten days a month, but there are 24 hours in a day, and the chances of it being wet when you need to be outside are pretty slim. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that the sun really does shine just for you when you ride a bike.
You are so getting wet today
Being a wee bit nerdy, when I first bought a cycle computer, I started keeping a log of all my rides (including commuting). Looking at the log stats for the last 4 years I see that: 6% were wet days, 4% were damp days and on less that >1% there was snow.