what do you do when it rains?
I am often asked, when people learn that I'm a bike messenger, "What do you do when it rains?" It's an innocent question--most people would rather not ride their bikes in the rain, after all--but I can't really give a more useful answer than the one I usually give: "Get wet."
This isn't entirely fair. There are several things you can do to make the rain a little easier. A cheap rear fender is five to ten dollars, attaches to your seatpost, and will prevent your rear wheel from kicking up dirty streetwater all along your back; it's pretty rare to encounter a bike in Seattle without at least one of these. Front fenders are rarer, and a bit harder to install, but they'll stop your front wheel from kicking water up onto your legs and ankles. At the end of the day that's maybe thirty dollars and not much labor to get yourself to the level where you're no longer taking on more water from your bike (though notably most messengers I know don't bother with the front fender).
Then you have your rain gear. You'd think that a rain coat is the most essential bit of kit, but I went about ten years without one and I was fine; the thing you need is an outer layer that cuts back on wind, and an inner layer that will keep you warm when it's wet; you'll still get wet, but it won't be as unpleasant. For a heavy rain, you'll probably want some boots, because the worst part is always walking around in wet shoes and socks. And there are other bits of rain gear you can wear: waterproof socks and gloves and so on. It's strictly optional, but it will help.
The main issue with gear, of course, is that you have to plan in advance. While you can wear the same jacket for pretty much the entire winter, most days you'd rather not be wearing boots on your bike if you can help it. Being able to feel exactly where your feet are on the pedals is important, and that's much easier to do in sneakers; and besides, you don't want to wear through your rain boots before you need them in the rain, do you? And a lot of rain gear is pretty uncomfortable when it's not raining. So you need to keep an eye on the weather, and plan for the rain, and it's always a little annoying to go through all that extra effort to prepare only to find that the forecast was a little off, and you would have been fine without it.
Some days, all of this preparation is enough; it's not raining hard enough that you'll get soaked through despite the gear, or cold enough that it starts to cut through your layers. You're only outside for a few minutes at a time on your runs, and by the time you have to make the long commute home it's cleared up. You'll have more days like this if you've invested the time and money into preparing.
But some days, the rain won't stop. Your gear might help for a while, but eventually the jacket is soaked through despite its rain repellent properties: there are always fault lines, whether it be pressure from the straps on your bag, or places where you didn't bother with gear, or just places you didn't zip up all the way because it's warm or uncomfortable. It might take longer than it would have otherwise, but if you spend long enough in the rain, the rain will win in the end.
It's always my hands that bother me first. When the body is cold the first thing it does is pull blood away from the extremities, and the ache that settles into those cold stiff fingers does not get easier with time. It's easy enough, once you're back inside, to massage some warmth back into cold hands, but after a while the cold starts settling in everywhere, bone-deep, and once it's in, it's in.
So you get home at the end of a rainy day, cold and drenched, and you hang up all of your gear to dry off, stuff some old newspapers into your wet shoes to help dry them off; then it's a long hot shower or a long lie down huddled in blankets, to try to burn off the chill, as you hope that by the time tomorrow rolls around you'll be warm enough and dry enough to do it all again.