Originally Posted by
Steely Dan
i have a problem with sweating inside my rain gear. i spent an arm and a leg on a $400 dollar super-waterproof and *ALLEGEDLY* super-breathable triple layer gortex shell from mountain hardware, but no dice. if i'm doing any kind of physical activity while wearing it, i'll still sweat like a mo-fo. it's absolutely disgusting how wet i get while wearing it when biking. so last night i got caught in rain for 12 of my 15 mile ride home, and instead of pulling over and getting the shell out of my pack, i just decided to ride through the rain as is to see what would happen.
it turns out i got soaked, but i was soaked with rain water instead of clammy and gross sweat. now, it was pretty warm last night, around 50 degrees or so. i'm wondering where the breaking point is temperature-wise where getting drenched by a cold rain is worse then getting soaked by my own sweat inside the shell.
from now on, if it's 50 or above and raining, i ain't gonna bother with the rain gear anymore.
When I was in the military I used to sweat and get much, much wetter from sweating under the issued raingear. So I just didn't bother with using it. I wasn't alone.
Right now for raingear, I have a lightweight windbreaker that seems to do a pretty good job. Although tonight when I got caught in the rain all I did was when I stopped after getting caught the second time was to take out my waterproof pannier bag cover and put it over my pannier and top bags. I didn't do anything for myself.
But I live in Florida and temperature wise it was very pleasant, so I wasn't worried about cold. And "knock wood" spandex dries rather quickly.
Although I have been looking at what appears to be a lightweight rain jacket at the LBS that I go to. Next time I'm there I'll talk to them about it and see what they have to say about it.