Wednesday night was another Beer and Bikes night, and because it’s April, it decided to rain on the way home. I’ve commented in the past how much I enjoy running in a nice rain, but biking is a bit of a different beast. However, each of the three annoyances I’m going to list have solutions. I simply haven’t implemented them.

First annoyance: water up the backside. When it’s wet outside you end up with dirt and water up your back, and when I got home I even had dirt up towards the top of my head. This is a simple problem that could be solved with fenders, but alas, I’m too cheap to get them on my bike and so I end up walking in the door from my garage trying to carefully remove my things from my jersey pockets.

The second annoyance is a wet seat. This could be solved by taking the bike seat inside with me when I park the bike, but frankly, this is way more work than I want to deal with. It does get a little annoying when my bike-shorts-padded-butt gets soaked while sitting on the seat, but it’s probably the least of my annoyances.

The final annoyance is my feet. I don’t have toe clips or cages on my pedals, so trying to keep my feet from sliding off the pedals is a challenge. This is one of those fixes that I go back and forth on. I know I don’t want to get toe clips as I don’t want to invest in special biking shoes. At the same time I’m not sure about toe cages, since I don’t like having to flip the pedals around when I start from a stop. I know it would give me more power on my up stroke, but in this case I wonder if the bother is worth the benefit.

Apart from these annoyances, it is nice to have moisture from the sky that isn’t snow. It was a lovely evening for a ride in the rain, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to hang out with good friends and get some exercise at the same time.