I was walking on Shabbat with two colleagues (we’re colleagues too, right?) soaking up whatever sun the overcast Mediterranean sky had to offer after some ghoulish thunderstorms on Friday night. Suddenly, we found ourselves caught in a windswept torrential downpour. The route we chose to the nearest shelter entailed walking into the wind, such that only our fronts were wet, while our backs were bone dry.
This then catalyzed the perennial question: Does one get less wet when walking or running in the rain?
- Here is an inconclusive mathematical solution, which does not account for the wind factor and its effect on the angle of the rain.
- The MythBusters tackled this question, twice. In their very first episode, eight attempts proved that one gets more wet when running in the rain. Astute viewers complained that the test was not realistic as they used “special effects rain” and not real rain. So the MythBusters waited for a rainy day and tried the test again. They confirmed that one gets more wet while walking.
We got soaked while walking, but I’m relatively sure that had we run, we would have exposed ourselves to an equal amount of, if not more, rain, given the wind direction and the angle at which the rain was coming down.
