Should you walk, run or sprint in the rain to get less wet?

Abstract

We have all wondered once whether we should walk, run or sprint in the rain in order to stay as dry as possible. Previous publications already addressed this subject using simple models, as for the shape of the body and the description of the rain and wind. This paper presents a detailed approach which relies on a more realistic ‘human body’ shape and accounts for the variability in time of both the wind and the raindrop size and velocity distributions. It appears that in some seldom cases with tailwind and light rain, there is an optimum velocity, but in general it is better to run as fast as possible. While ‘running’ instead of ‘walking’ yields significant gain, the extra effort required to ‘sprint’ is not always worth it.