The rain _will_ come

I haven’t wrote a blog post in a month because I’ve been entirely caught up in preparing a new Corydalis release… to the extend that today I felt completely fed up and wanted to do something else.

Initially the weather forecast said rain all afternoon, and around noon it was quite overcast, but then it lightened up, and the forecast moved the rain to late afternoon (5-6pm) and decreased the intensity (<1mm/hr, which is nothing). So (as it was still a bit before 3pm) a bike ride seemed in order. Especially as I recently realised I haven’t ridden my road bike in—gasp—10 months :( So, thinking about a 2-2½ hour slow ride, I got ready, took my road bike shoes, took the Garmin, took the bike bump, got into the bike room, pumped up the wheels, and got ready to ride.

First partial surprise, power meter battery dead. Like dead dead, didn’t even manage to wake it up. Kind of expected, since on my last ride in July last year it said low battery, but I was kind of hoping it still has some juice. Never-mind, a ride is a ride.

Second surprise, as I exit the garage, the sun is nowhere to be seen, clouds all around, and the air is cooler. So scratch my planned ride, I’ll just take a short ride around the neighbourhood to move a bit (both myself and the bike). I re-check the forecast and it says, some showers all over for the next 2 hours, but still not bad (3-5mm/h, but short spikes only).

Everything starts nice, and to my surprise, I haven’t forget how to clip in when starting at a stop light on the first try. The road bike system is asymmetric (you can only clip in on one side of the pedal), and I’m very much used to the SPD one from MTB, where you don’t have to look, just clip in. But there’s a trick even with the road system, you have to put your foot on the pedal quite precisely at “12:15” o’clock, and then you’re good as the inertia of the pedal will have put the correct side up at this position. I feared I forgot this, but all good, and I take a leisure ride.

Towards Regensdorf one could clearly see rain already, and all through my ride thunderstrikes were loud, but I was dry. Very dry, no rain at all. I thought the forecast was too pessimistic, I rode 30 minutes with nothing more than a few scattered raindrops.

And then, right at minute 30, and with less than 2km to go, the road starts getting wet. I was surprised as I couldn’t yet feel the rain, but the road was quite wet. A minute later, the rain is quite heavy, and another 30 seconds later, it turns a bit into hail, as it was making a “plonk” noise hitting my helmet and was painful on my skin. So in this last basically one kilometre I go from dry to completely drenched and cold, and I was very happy this was the end of my short ride, as I was not dressed nor prepared for rain.

Checking later the forecast, it showed that for about 5 or so minutes it rained with a rate of 15mm/h, which is pretty strong, before mellowing down to what it was predicted in the morning.

Lesson learned, but thankfully it was on a short ride, and was otherwise pleasant to get on a light and fast bike again :)