This has been a particularly dry summer around here, but mother nature attempted to make up for it the last couple of days. The remnants of Hurricane Debbie dumped bunches of (much needed) rain on us.
I thought today would be a good day to talk about rain, and maybe even attempt to answer the age old question: running through the rain or walking through the rain —which technique keeps you the driest?
If you think about it, it makes intuitive sense that running through the rain will keep you drier than walking. If you’re running, you spend less time in the rain, after all. But there’s an argument that says it won’t do any good.
So — every time there’s a downpour and you need to get to your car, you’re faced with this confounding question: should you walk or run?
The argument against running is that more drops hit your chest and legs when you run. If you’re walking, the theory is the drops mainly hit your head. So those that favor walking say that running exposes you to more drops, not fewer.
Of course an important question like this has been pondered by a number of scientists. In 1987, an Italian physicist determined that sprinting keeps you drier than walking, but only by about 10 percent — which might not be worth the effort and the risk of slipping. And in 1995, a British researcher concluded that the increased front-drenching of running effectively cancels out the reduced rain exposure.
Well, like any theory about such an important subject, not everyone agrees. Those findings didn’t seem right to two climatologists at the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, North Carolina, who decided to put them to the test. They put on identical outfits with plastic bags underneath to keep moisture from seeping out of the clothes and to keep their own sweat from adding to the rainwater. One ran through the rain for about 330 feet. The other walked the same distance in the rain. They weighed the wet clothes, compared the weights to those when the clothes were dry, and determined that the one who walked got 40 percent wetter than the one who ran.
So it appears that if you need to get to your car in the rain and you wan to to get less wet — run.
But lately, if I need to get to my car and it’s raining, I just wait until it stops.
— 30 —
Thank you for this. Now I have to walk outside to my parking lot and pondered this recently. However, think it’s more likely if one tried to run one would slip and fall in the rain than if one walked briskly.