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Icy rider
Cool runnings
‘When’ is in winter. Here’s ‘how’ the ‘why’ is up to you.
Sure, I hear you say, I ride my bike in winter (well, occasionally). What’s the problem with riding in the cold, anyway (if you don’t go too far from home and it’s not too cold)?
Well, quite a bit is potentially wrong with it — and a lot of that can’t be beaten just by being macho. A lot of it, though, can be sidestepped by being smart. Here’s how.
Problems first (and we’re just looking at the rider in this story, not the road conditions, potential bike hassles and so on): you are facing anything from partial loss of control
| | over your bike to the possibility of hypothermia and frostbite when you ride in winter.
Wind chill is a major factor in this, and is often ignored. If you’re riding at a little over 80km/h in an air temperature of 10 degrees, the effective temperature is zero. Should the air temperature drop to minus -5 (not unusual in parts of Australia), the effective temperature becomes -19 and, according to a chart compiled for Australian staff in Antarctica, you are in imminent danger of facial frostbite.
Your nose could drop off, in other words.
Hypothermia, meanwhile (which essentially means being rooly, rooly cold) will make you act even weirder than you normally do as your brain ceases to function properly. But it need not be so. | | | |  | | | | | | |  Pacsafe Anti-Theft Motorcycle Gear – visit www.pac-safe.com Featuring patented exomesh security technology, Pacsafe introduces-soft sided, weatherproof bags which lock closed and lock to your bike. View products now>
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| | Read on.
First, consider what your body actually does in response to extreme cold. Its first priority is to keep your brain and other vital organs ticking over — which means keeping them warm. If you’ve seen those pictures of climbers rescued from Pitt Street, sorry, Mount Everest, it’s always their fingers and other extremities that go grey with frostbite. That isn’t just because they are, well, extremities, exposed to the cold. It’s also because their bodies have shunted heat away from them to the core of the body and the brain.
Likewise on the bike, if your hands and feet start to get cold, it may be because your body is using its resources to keep more important bits of itself warm. So it makes sense to start there, and reduce the need for the body to shunt heat away from your fingers and toes.
So how do you make sure your head and torso are protected from the cold, and your hands and other extremities stay warmer as well because the body has more heat to spare?
Wearing a full-face helmet, with its layers of insulation including (effectively) esky material, is a good start for your head. Then there are all sorts of things you can do to keep your neck warm (very important because the blood flows through it to go to your head), like scarves and dedicated neck warmers, available from many European clothing manufacturers.
One of those tubes of elasticated microfibre is excellent — I have two, one of which came in a packet of Oxford heated handlebar grips. The other is also a freebie, from BMW. Make sure you don’t cut off all airflow into your helmet or you will asphyxiate, which is not a good career move except maybe for artists whose works will vastly increase in value once they’re dead.
You will not be surprised to discover that clothing is the answer for your torso. Leather is not especially warm unless it is seriously lined, which it tends not to be to keep its smart, body-hugging shape. The textile jackets and pants available today with their various inserts and liners are excellent, especially since you can still wear warm layers under them. I’m very fond of my Kathmandu thermal long underwear, for example, and polar fleece-type windcheaters make another good layer. Andy Strapz makes a specialised pullover/shirt with a long tail that stays tucked in. It’s also very warm and comfortable.
When choosing your jacket, make sure it’s not too short in the back, either, or cold breezes will blow up along your spine and make you most uncomfortable as well as chill your kidneys and make you go to the toilet even more than the cold weather does already. Obvious but easy to forget.
Zip-together combinations with similar pants are ideal. Don’t wear so many layers that you get too bulky to move comfortably and easily, which could mean you can’t control the bike properly or the Michelin Man might mistake you for his blind date.
Excuse us blokes here for a moment, ladies. Don’t tell me the Creator doesn’t have a sense of humour. Why else but for a good laugh would She cause our bladders to demand constant emptying in the cold while the “conduit” for this drainage shrinks to the point where it can be almost impossible to find in among the many layers of your thick winter clothing? Women, you might notice, don’t have this problem!
All right. Glad to have that off my, er, chest, so to speak. Now, you can also go hi-tech and add an electric vest or other electric heating to your winter armoury. BMW offers quite a variety and there are others on the market. My immediate reaction is to sneer at this kind of overkill, but then I remember some cold nights out on the highway and I reconsider. If electric is your thing, go for it.
Make sure your bike produces enough Watts to power Wattever (sorry…) you choose to plug in, though. A vest is a good start because, once again it keeps your torso warm. If your bike doesn’t have a power socket, consider fitting one. Firms like Powerlet make excellent harness-and-socket combinations to suit just about all bikes. Take a wet-weather suit along to add a wind-excluding layer in case it gets really chilly out there.
Right. That takes care of priority number one. Now it’s time to look after those extremities directly.
I’m a great believer in heated handlebar grips. I’ve used them in bitterly cold conditions and have found that just getting heat into my body via my hands enables me to ride in much colder weather than I’d normally suffer. We’ve just fitted them to the project Outfit and they get a fair bit of use in winter. Grips are also less trouble than electric gloves, although my wife swears by the heated undergloves she wore while pillioning.
Waterproof boots and gloves tend to be warmer than others, partly because they shield your hands and feet from the wind so thoroughly. I’ve heard it said that wearing your pants outside your boots (sorry, Ulyssians) keeps you much warmer than tucking them in. I don’t know why this would be and have not managed to prove it to my own satisfaction, so I’d be interested in your comments.
If it’s just cold, you may want to wear your gloves over your sleeves, but if it’s likely to rain, tuck them in. I know it’s counter-intuitive, but it works better. The sleeves need to be tight around the gloves, of course. Some BMW gloves actually have an inner sleeve to make it possible to effectively have them both in and outside the jacket sleeves. Ach, zose Chermans. Mittens are usually warmest, but they’re not necessarily the best for controlling the bike.
I think it’s Oxford that sells Hippo Hands — huge, impervious fabric shrouds that cover the handlebar ends completely, including levers and, of course, your hands. There are other brands. These work really well but, unfortunately, they look kind of naff. I’ve used them in horrible conditions in New Zealand and think I might not have made it over one particular cold stretch if I hadn’t had them. Off-road-style plastic handguards are some use, too, and you can even make your own from plastic juice bottles cut open and taped to the handlebars.
Of course, you can’t be prepared all the time — the weather can change very quickly, after all, and so can travel plans. You might have intended to stick to the flat country, but someone suggested crossing the Snowies ... and here you are in a blizzard. If you can, try to improvise — newspaper stuffed down inside your jacket is excellent for protecting your torso.
Occasionally, you can buy cheap rain suits at service stations or sports stores, or even pick up big garbage bags at a grocery to wear over or under your clothes. But, ideally, you should get out of the cold if you’re not prepared for it. That may mean calling an early halt and finding a pub or it might even mean turning around to get to lower elevations.
Art Friedman, who writes for Motorcycle Cruiser magazine in the US, has a neat example of what to do if you get cold.
“As cold permeates your body and hypothermia sets in, you will get clumsy and then stupid — not a great combination for a motorcyclist,” he writes. “If you can't get inside, try callisthenics at the side of the road or seek other shelter. I know of a rider who flagged down a policeman and asked to sit in his car. The policeman put him in the back seat and patrolled for a while, then returned him to his bike.”
I would probably not try this in Australia, although I don’t know — a lot of cops (and ARR readers) are motorcyclists...
By the way, don’t try to warm up with alcohol. This does all the wrong things to your body’s heat balance and can badly screw up your metabolism. Those St Bernard dogs with the brandy barrels around their necks so beloved of cartoonists would have killed more people than they saved if they’d been real. Warm, not hot, non-alcoholic drinks are best.
Mind you, once you’re warm and sitting in front of the fire in the pub, having checked in and put the bike away somewhere safe, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t partake of the odd drinkie. We do.
Bartender, a glass of your finest Stone’s ... ah, the 1992 vintage.
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