Apparently there’s this little black book of biking that gets given to lots of blokes when they pass their test. It tells them such incredible nuggets of wisdom – like if you want warm fingers and toes and always to be dry then consider sticking with a car….
WHY would anyone think that if you ride a bike you have to suffer? For reasons beyond my comprehension some bikers consider it unmanly to wear anything other than an extra jumper when temperatures drop to frankly what can feel like arctic conditions these days 😦
You will notice I use the word “unmanly” – as I have yet to meet the woman who shares this opinion lol! Personally if I was a bloke I wouldn’t want to risk my b****cks retracting into my body in a bid to keep warm. By the same token since I’m a girl I’m not about to risk inverted nipples either 🙂
Heated gear may be for woosses, it may be that you feel as if you resemble the size of the Michelin Man, you may even look like a school kid with leads coming out of your wrists similar to when your mum joined your mittens together! and for some it may be outside the price bracket, but as Rhett Butler put it “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn!”.
Heated gear is the future – once you have known the bliss that is heat travelling along the back of each finger and across the back of the hand, like me you will be a convert. Once you arrive at a destination after an hour-long journey and you are still as warm and comfy as when you left home – whilst all around you fellow non-heated-gear bikers are painfully peeling off gloves from frozen fingers, barely able to get their wallets open to purchase that much-needed warming mug of tea – then is the moment when you realise kit like Gerbing may be expensive but by gawd it’s worth its weight in gold.
(Gerbing may cost an arm and a leg but it’s guaranteed for life – and when I’ve had a glove stop working, or even a sleeve of the jacket liner – they sorted it out nice n easy!)
I may have been mocked (repeatedly 🙂 ) for my choice of winter gear, but once I’d got the gloves it was but a hop skip and a jump to heated jacket liner and dare I say it – heated socks lol!
Gerbing hooks up nicely to your battery (in the pic you can just see the lead sticking out from the bike seat, beside my right hip). If you’re worried about draining your battery then don’t be. In six years I’ve only experienced a problem once and that was when I’d hooked myself up before switching on the ignition D’oh!! If you’re that worried get an Optimate and leave your bike on trickle charge.
I’d also recommend a temperature controller as it can be a little too hot in town but you will want it higher for motorway work! And of course there’s always heated grips for those milder days when you still need a little something extra 🙂
If you’re not blessed with superhot circulation, then who cares what others think, or that you may be breaking some strange code of the road that requires you to be as hard as nails??
The moral of the tale is that bikers are normal people – with the same soft vulnerable and tendency to cold bits as anybody else. So if you don’t have or want to use a car, and want to ride all year round, there’s no need to suffer. Remember: “Heated Gear – it’s the future!” lol 🙂 🙂
A bird's eye view to biking! 