Series: Winter Riding - I

I thought I might take some time to do occasional "Series" type topical posts. These topical posts would span several posts, perhaps all in one day or across several days or weeks, exploring a given topic. So this first series will be on Winter Riding. I don't profess to be an expert and there are whole books dedicated to riding in various weather and climate conditions. I can only relate to you what I know from my own experiences or nuggets of information I've learned over the years. I would suggest you read any of the plethora of riding books written by David Hough, Ron Ayers and other accepted experts in the field.

I'd like to cover several topics in the Winter Riding series.
I - Keeping warm
II - Road conditions
III - Benefits and pitfalls
IV - ??? I may add more topics later

Winter Riding - I: Keeping warm

Riding a motorcycle in the Winter can be just as enjoyable and fun as on a sunny, warm Spring day. The key, of course, is keeping warm and dry. This is nothing new and should be obvious to anyone who ever rode or spent time outdoors during the chillier times of the year. Yet so many riders barrel down the road in Winter wearing scant more than their year-round leather jacket, skull cap, fingerless gloves and blue jeans. I'm always amazed when I see a "real biker" riding down the road, bare face red, his eyes watering from the cold wind and his hands invariably reaching for the engine at stop lights. I'll never understand the people who put image over comfort - especially when I think about things like hypothermia and frost bite.

Wind is evil

First and foremost to keeping warm while riding is the need to decrease the amount of exposed skin. If you're the type to ride without a helmet and to use fingerless "cruiser" gloves, you are dramatically decreasing your body's ability to retain heat. You are purposely introducing an artificial and extreme type of wind chill. Wind chill is defined as: the perceived temperature resulting from the effect of wind, in combination with cold air, which increases the rate of heat loss from the human body. In short, you are directly and rapidly increasing the rate at which you lose body heat. This is bad. The longer you remain in this exposed condition, the more likely you are to suffer from hypothermia, frost bite, decreased mental acuity, reduced vision and control of your extremities.
The following chart helps illustrate real vs. perceived temperatures when wind is introduced at various temperatures.

In conjunction with minimizing exposed skin to the wind, one also needs to cut wind and airflow into your clothing and, ultimately, to your unexposed skin. Even a summer weight jacket will feel warmer - albeit slightly - if it has a wind barrier layer; preferably as its outer-most layer. By decreasing the effect of wind cutting into your clothing at the outer-most layer, the inner layers of clothing are better able to keep you warm and wick off less heat from your skin.

Layers: not just for cakes!

Layering your clothes helps provide a simple type of insulation. Air is "trapped" between the layers of clothing and is generally kept a little warmer than the adjacent, outer-facing layer. If you wear, for instance, a t-shirt, a regular long sleeve shirt, a fleece liner and a wind proof jacket, the layer of air between your body and the t-shirt will be only slightly cooler than your body, and the next layer outward will be cooler, and so on, until ultimately, the jacket itself (likely made of several layers of various materials), will be equal with the ambient temperature outside - on its outer layer - while you remain warm and comfortable inside the layers.

One important fact that many riders overlook is this layered approach to dressing only slows down wind chill. It can not eliminate wind chill completely. In fact, just the opposite is true. Eventually the cold will find its way through all the layers you're wearing and will, eventually, begin cooling your body to dangerous levels, depending of course on how cold it actually is. Body weight, fat content, general physical condition and circulatory health all play a part. The real trick is knowing how to recognize when you're too cold and how long you can stay outside in various temperature conditions. I'm no health expert, so I would encourage you to seek out proper medical advice on recognizing and understanding hypothermia, frost bite and the like. In short, if you feel cold, you are cold and you should take steps to not feel cold. "cold" is relative, of course. It's likely that you will always feel some amount of chill in Winter while riding a motorcycle. That "warm and toasty" feeling is often a myth, or hopeful wishing at best.

Every person is different and when I feel cold, you may still be very comfortable, and vice versa. There's no perfect formula for everyone, but the basics generally work:

• Dress in thin, lighter layers rather than one thick layer
• Minimize or eliminate gaps in your clothing where wind can get in
• Overlap where ever possible, longer shirts pulled down over the tops of pants, etc.
  
• Minimize or eliminate the area of exposed skin to the wind
• Take frequent breaks and when you do take breaks, try to go inside
• During breaks, open up your jackets to get the inner layers acclimated to warmer air again
• During breaks, try to walk around and let your body circulate warmer blood to all your extremities
  
• KEEP DRY - evaporative cooling in Winter is BAD
• Block as much wind as possible - use a windshield or wind deflectors, ensure your gear is "wind proof" on the outer layers, use rain gear over regular clothing to help cut the wind, etc.

Turning up the heat

Many people like to use the chemical heating packs available at sporting goods and hunting supply stores to put in their gloves and boots. Taken by themselves, they seem to work fine, are inexpensive and are good for traveling light. They're disposable, readily available and can be used at a moment's notice. By all indications, they may be the perfect answer to cold hands and feet. But personally, I don't consider them a good long term solution.

As a daily commuter and weekend pleasure rider, I can only guess at how many of these I would go through in an average Winter riding season. Typically, once you turn these packs "on" by initiating a chemical reaction inside the pack, they continue to generate heat until they're depleted. Most of these packs work for 3-4 hours. Again, taking the daily work commute as an example, using one in the morning for a 30-minute ride to work leaves 3 1/2 to 4 hours of wasted chemical heat goodness, and the same applies in the evening for the ride home. Not many of us can ride to work, perform a day's work and ride home all within a 3-4 hour period. This is not a good per-dollar value over time.

I would suggest that if you like these chemical heat packs, you should limit their use to emergencies, when you need a little something extra, or for those (probably) rare occasions when you may need to take a passenger along - usually on a one-way or short trip, like picking up the car at the shop, a quick run to the movie store or to visit with Mom for a couple of hours. I would absolutely suggest you keep a handful of them in your saddle bags for "just in case" scenarios. But that's really it.

Power to the people

So... Let's talk about heated clothing. Electrically heated riding gear (and specialty items for many other activities) is available from several well-known sources. Some of these companies specialize only in motorcycle riding gear, while others may be more widely used by hunters, fishermen, landscapers, etc. The electrical power can be supplied by vehicles like motorcycles, snowmobiles, scooters and personal aircraft, or by portable power sources like rechargeable batteries and battery packs.

The clothing you typically find at most places and for reasonable prices ranges from inner-layer liners to full outer clothing and wet-weather gear. Liners typically come as full jacket liners or vests, pants liners, socks and glove liners. Outer clothing is available as fully heated and layered over-pants, jackets and gloves. One company (and perhaps others!), Scorpion USA, even has heated visors on their "Winter Sport" line of helmets. While generally designed for snowmobile use, these are easily adapted to motorcycles and other activities and vehicles.

Some of the more popular heated clothing vendors are:

• Gerbing - http://www.gerbing.com/
  
• Widder - http://www.widder.com/
  
• Warm-n-Safe - http://warmnsafe.com/
  
• Tourmaster - http://tourmaster.com/
  

Getting started

Where do I start? What should I get if I can only afford one piece at a time? What's the best brand? These and other questions are often asked by people seeking help with heated clothing. The Internet at large is rife with opinion pieces, professional and amateur reviews. suggestions and marketing info out the wazoo. Please don't rely on this post to be any of that. Again, I can put forth my experiences, but they should in no way be considered the end-all, be-all of available information.

If you find that you wish to get some heated gear and your budget can only support one or two pieces, my suggestion is this: GLOVES, GLOVES and GLOVES. I don't care what kind of motorcycle you ride, your hands are almost always out in the wind. And, with the exception of your feet, your hands are the farthest away from your central core and that necessary supply of warm blood. My suggestion is to get a pair of windproof textile or treated leather gloves and a proper electronic controller.

Conventional wisdom says that if you keep your core warm, the rest of your body will remain warm. This is true if you're engaging in any physical activity that has you moving around, such as hiking, shoveling snow, sledding, etc., and is often true in all other times. However, motorcycle riding is a fairly body-static activity and you don't really generate any extra heat or energy doing it. Combined with sitting in the wind, acting as a parachute on your bike that has the aerodynamics of a brick... well, you can see what I'm aiming at here. Layering your torso with conventional, non-heated clothing is often satisfactory for the average commute or short pleasure ride, but your hands are almost guaranteed to be the first thing to get cold. Once your hands get cold enough to need attention, you are likely not in as much control of your motorcycle as you might otherwise be, and are probably on your way to frost bite.

Note: if any part of your body gets so cold as to go numb, stop and get warmed up immediately! Flag down help or call someone to pick you up if you can't find a store or office building willing to let you spend a few minutes warming up. I have a Walmart halfway between my office and home. Before I bought myself the electric clothing, it was a common practice for me to stop in Walmart and do some window shopping.

Often times a rider arrives at his destination feeling a little chilly but spends quite a bit of time trying to warm up his hands. Having heated gloves will not only keep your hands warm, thus staving off frost bite and discomfort, but can also help keep your arms warm as the blood can be rewarmed as it cycles through your hands. Not significantly, but combined with the layers that extend down your arms, many riders find that good electric gloves can extend their riding season weeks or months longer than expected (when factoring in dressing the rest of your body for the weather, too).

The next most important piece of heated clothing is the jacket or jacket liner. This only helps to reinforce that aforementioned conventional wisdom: keep your core warm. On many motorcycles without fairings or windshields, your body is a sail in the wind. Even the best layering practices will eventually lose out to wind and cold. If you have a long commute, if it's exceptionally cold or if you are out on a day-ride, you will find that a heated jacket or jacket liner will make you feel room-temperature comfortable for many hours, likely extending the ride and increasing your enjoyment of the ride. Jacket liners can be purchased as full liners with sleeves. vests, vests with removable sleeves and with or without collars. Some even have removable collars for maximum flexibility.

Most companies make their clothing to connect completely together forming one or more complete circuits; the jacket is usually the central piece, the gloves and pants plugging into the jacket, the socks plugging into the pants, and so forth. Gerbing, especially, identified the need for multiple controllers even on interconnected clothing. For instance, you may find that you need to turn your gloves up to 75% of maximum, but your jacket liner may be fine at 25% or 30%. If you do select a full set of heated gear, it's well worth the few extra dollars to get this flexibility. In the long run, comfort and safety far, far outweigh the minor cost differences between single- and multi-circuit heated gear.

Electric clothing, no matter how small or how few pieces you use, will put some amount of extra draw on your bike's electrical system. Most modern bikes will handle the extra draw with little worry at all. But older or smaller-displacement bikes may have weaker components or less available wattage, and you may be technically limited in what your bike can power. Please be sure to check each gear manufacturer's recommended available spare wattage and check with your bike's manufacturer to ensure the electrical system can support these accessories.

Note: And old-school rheostat controller or switched on/off timer controller will be hard on your bike's electrical system and a simple on/off switch will only supply 100% power to your heated gear and will likely result in gear that is far too hot in most conditions. A quality electronic controller such as Gerbing's controller or the HeatTroller from Warm-n-Safe is good at providing a low-draw, non-spiking power source for your gear, having a non-stress draw on your bike's electrical system, and for providing a wide range of adjustability for your comfort. The technical discussions on using one of these modern electronic controllers rather than an older style timer or rheostat can be found on several of the vendors' and enthusiasts' sites.

A smart rider is a safe rider is a comfortable rider is a smart rider

There is one other very important point about using electrically heated clothing that many - nay, most - riders tend to ignore, potentially at great risk to their own health and safety. You should not adjust the heat too high. The question you ask yourself should not be "Do I feel hot?", but rather "Do I feel cold?", hoping for an answer of 'no'. This is the smart approach to using heated gear. Turning the gear up too high can cause you to sweat. The moisture from sweating will quickly wick through your clothing and eventually you may find yourself feeling exceptionally chilled. This will cause you to turn the heat up higher, thus causing more sweating, and 'round and 'round we go. Not smart. A full body chill could easily turn into hypothermia, leading to all sorts of badness.

You should not strive to feel hot in your heated gear. Rather, you should only use enough of the power adjustment to not feel cold, or to take the dangerous edge off the chill. If you do find yourself in a situation where you're sweating and constantly increasing the heat adjustment, it's time to get off the bike, take off your gear and dry off at room temperature for a while. Find that Walmart, or go have a snack somewhere!! Do not continue on while sweating in your gear. That hot/cold/hot cycle of self deception will turn into a problem later. Be smart. Be safe.

Mother Nature has no time for heroes and bad-asses

Remember when you were a kid and your mother always told you to wear a hat when it's cold out? It's a known scientific fact that the human body, being an erect biped, can lose a significant amount of its heat through the exposed head. Wear a helmet. Aside from helping to prevent frost bite to your face, ears, etc., wearing a helmet can also help keep your whole body feeling warmer as the helmet's built-in insulation makes for a perfect heat plug. No exposed skull, no lost heat (or darned little, anyway). Just wear the helmet.

In conclusion...

This is not meant to be a full "how to" article, just a basic run-down of my opinions and experiences. This post turned out much longer and in hindsight, I could have split this one into several posts. But... it is what it is. I hope you enjoyed it. Please feel free to shoot questions to me in email or via the comment sections.