I recall hearing this from time to time, that you end up getting wetter by running through heavy rain as opposed to walking normally.
Of course, some variables play into this I suppose, not the least of which is distance travelled, because at some point, you’re going to be soaked through no matter if you’re running or walking in the rain.
But how about a quick burst from the door to the car? I run in heavy rain.
Anyone else heard this?
Of course the other assumption is that you forgot your umbrella…
Well, yeah, there’s that…
I suppose I need to give myself one of these for not searching the database: :smack:
But you know, I am kind of a spontaneous person, and that just popped into my head as I left work (it’s raining, of course) so I thought I’d throw it out there.
Sometimes I find it more fun to read the musings of the average joe rather than abide by the wisdom of the gods.
Before I was a Doper, I wrote a piece on this question for Everything2. The piece covers Cecil’s answer, the Peterson & Wallis paper, and my own semi-mathematical attempt to model the problem. One of the big factors is time, obviously.
One factor that’s often omitted in these discussions is the fact that real-world rainstorms aren’t uniform. A real rain will be heavier at some times, and lighter than others, and people needing to go places in the rain will often try to time their movement from shelter to shelter for those times when it’s lighter. If it takes you 30 seconds to run from point A to point B, and 60 seconds to walk, and a lull in the rain lasts for 40 seconds, then you’ll be very significantly drier for running.
My model for this (and presumably the scientific one) is that two people equally dressed leave for a predetermined destination at the same time, side-by-side, thereby enduring the same conditions.
I never understood the controversy in this question. Just set up a big lawn sprinkler that showers down over about 30 feet in diameter. Walk through it using only tiny baby steps. You will get soaked. Change clothes and run at a full sprint through it. You will hardly get wet at all. I fail to see how this experiment is significantly different than the question at hand. Common sense easily reigns in this case.
I think the thing is, they try to make it as if there are two surfaces being rained on, the front and the head. If you run, the head gets soaked for less time. If you run, so to the logic goes, the front gets more wet than walking. I fail to see the logic here, though. Assuming your front is a straight vertical line (which it’s not) and the rain is perfectly vertical (which it’s not), it seems to me that there should be equal wetness in this area. It’s just that the walking person’s raindrops, scheduled for his imminent collision, are just higher up in the atmosphere at the time he starts. If you outline, at time zero, all the raindrops that will hit him on the front, it’s a steep parallelogram when he walks and a stumpy one when he walks. everyone knows the area of a paralellogram are the same if two parallel sides are equal in size and equally far apart (which they are).
The precise durations of the lulls and such, sure. But a human can, with a fair degree of certainty, say something like “It’s raining less hard now than it was a short time ago, and it’s likely to start raining hard again in the immediate future”. As long as humans are better than chance at making such predictions, it’s to your advantage to spend as little time exposed as possible, to reduce the impact of the unpredictability.
Wait a minute. This was the first Mythbusters episode I ever saw, and I remember their conclusion being exactly the opposite. They tried to duplicate real rain conditions, with size and frequency of drops, and angle caused by a light wind, and their conclusion was walking keeps you drier than running over a fixed distance. Being familiar with Cecil’s column, I never believed this result, but I do still enjoy the show.
There was a key difference in the experiments. Cecil measured raindrops on a piece of cardboard held over his head, whereas the Mythbusters measured how much water had soaked into a jumpsuit (with hood of some kind). You could conclude that running will keep your head drier, but make your body wetter, but I still don’t believe it. If it’s raining, I’m making a dash for it.
Actually, the first time Mythbusters did it, they set up artificial rain in a shed, with sprinklers. Their result was that walking was drier. They later revisited the myth in actual rain, and got the opposite result.
