BIKETO: Wear a raincoat or windbreaker
Disposable shower cap. Hehe, not for taking a shower on the road.
Cover the helmet with the shower cap to keep your hair from getting wet.
Gaiters. To prevent rainwater from flowing into your shoes.
You can wear waterproof gloves. If you find non-breathable gloves uncomfortable, you can choose not to wear any. But if you wear non-waterproof gloves, they’ll get wet during the ride and make you feel very cold.
Editor’s reminder: Make sure to do a good job of keeping dry when cycling in the rain. If you don’t, the rain soaking your whole body can lead to hypothermia. Rainwater is already cold, and the strong wind during cycling will make it evaporate quickly from your body, eventually causing hypothermia.
Symptoms and causes of hypothermia:
Hypothermia (the term was originally directly translated as “low body temperature,” which doesn’t sound like a technical term) can quickly cause intense shivering, motor dysfunction, slurred speech, numbness (in the early stage), then (in the mid-stage) an inability to effectively use hands and feet, cessation of shivering, confusion, apathy, without feelings of despair, no longer feeling cold, and in the later stage, limb stiffness, weakened heart function, dilated pupils, and loss of the will or ability to save oneself—possibly even becoming too relaxed. (Black humor: at least freezing to death isn’t painful.) In the late stage, one loses consciousness and dies due to cardiac or respiratory failure.
A common ignorant view is that “XX temperature isn’t really that cold, so there shouldn’t be any danger.” It can be said that under the right conditions, temperatures below thirty degrees can cause hypothermia. So why has no one ever heard of someone “freezing to death” at twenty-something degrees? That’s because how fast hypothermia progresses depends on 1) the temperature difference between the skin and the environment, and 2) the speed at which the body loses heat to the environment.
Editor’s recommendation: Another way to communicate with teammates while cycling
If your skin is exposed to air, a very thin layer of warm air forms on its surface. This air layer is close to your skin’s temperature, so you won’t get hypothermia. Feeling cold in the wind is partly because this air layer is quickly replaced by colder air. (Another part is due to faster evaporation of moisture, which we’ll discuss later.) At this time, the ambient temperature is the air temperature, but because air doesn’t conduct heat away very quickly, normal wind generally doesn’t cause rapid hypothermia. If you’re immersed in flowing water, and the water isn’t extremely cold, your body’s heat isn’t lost too quickly, so your own heat production can hold up for a long time. But if you stay in for a long time, shivering (your body’s response to hypothermia by generating heat through muscle activity) is inevitable. After that, if you don’t get out of the water, hypothermia will continue to progress. If the water is cold, hypothermia will set in quickly. For many drowning victims, the catastrophic cause is hypothermia, which leads to drowning.
Moving air conducts heat faster than still air, which many people know. But have you noticed that in winter—especially among those who grew up in southern regions—there are plenty of people with loose collars and gaps in their clothing, wearing a lot but still shivering from the cold? In the wilderness, a simple sealed nylon shirt (no need for GORETEX) provides surprisingly good insulation in windy conditions. The material itself isn’t particularly insulating, but it prevents the warm layer of air near your body from being disrupted. That’s where its effectiveness lies. Even in almost windless conditions, this kind of nylon shirt offers decent insulation, which is why ultra-light climbers use it instead of fleece. But be aware that heat can still escape through very thin fabric, so this kind of clothing can’t replace thick insulating layers in low temperatures. Experienced people use it in summer.
Dry air has low thermal conductivity, but if your body is wet, water evaporation will carry away a lot of heat, so avoid wearing wet clothes when it’s cold. The principle behind what people often call moisture-wicking underwear is to quickly remove moisture from the body’s surface (through other physical processes). Back in the day, without such materials, if you didn’t have dry clothes, one way to prevent hypothermia was to take off your innerwear and wait naked for your clothes to dry.
A short and effective way to prevent hypothermia is: only two out of cold, wind, and wet can be accepted at once. This means that when it’s just cold and windy, ordinary windproof and insulated clothing will suffice; when it’s just windy and you’re wearing wet clothes but the temperature isn’t cold (i.e., close to body temperature), there won’t be a problem; when it’s just wet clothes and cold, finding a windless place and removing your clothes will significantly slow the onset of hypothermia. Note that at twenty degrees Celsius, it can be considered “cold” as mentioned above. At twenty degrees, if you don’t control heat loss, you’ll eventually suffer, but the hypothermia process usually allows you to wait until daylight or rescue. At ten degrees, uncontrolled heat loss (for example, no raincoat and no shelter, being drenched in cold rain all night) can cause you to lose most of your ability to move and think, entering the early stage of hypothermia. At this point, you should start consciously doubting your judgment, and avoid technical activities (some seemingly technical accidents may essentially be caused by not bringing enough clothing!). At a few degrees above zero, uncontrolled heat loss quickly becomes life-threatening, and you can rapidly lose the ability to save yourself. So even in above-zero temperatures, people can “freeze to death”—what determines it is how quickly and how long the person loses heat.
Hypothermia is one of the most basic pieces of outdoor safety knowledge. Its danger lies in how heat loss is a common occurrence in daily life, which makes people take it lightly. But very few people in daily life enter a stage of uncontrollable heat loss, so most don’t truly understand hypothermia.
Don’t really think freezing to death is at least not painful—the whole-body shivering continues even after muscle spasms, and it’s not comfortable. The despair of knowing you’re done for isn’t something you can easily remain mentally composed about either. Don’t forget that in remote places, unless the temperature is close to thirty degrees every day, always carry an extra piece of clothing. Even a large plastic bag can serve as wind and rain protection for a while. Under many conditions, things like crevasses, altitude sickness, avalanches, or falls aren’t more dangerous than simply being “cold.” The principles and solutions for hypothermia are well-established, unlike altitude sickness. Dying from hypothermia is always due to inadequate preparation (including ignorance).