This jacket just showed up from the folks at Marmot and damn I’m excited about riding in the rain in this thing! I used to follow Marmot’s products as Spoke’s founder Emma Gee once worked in an outdoor store, but to be honest it’s been a while since I paid attention to what’s been happening and most of the official web description comes across as Greek to me. So I’ll break it down for you. It’s waterproof, 10,000mm waterproof. I know that’s some Greek right there, so if you put a square tube with inner dimensions of 25mm x 25mm over a section of this jacket, you could fill it with water to a height of 10,000mm before water would begin to leak through. The higher the number, the more waterproof the fabric and 10,000 is pretty good.
It’s breathable; 20,000 to 47,000gm in fact. Again, more Greek. Breathability is the measure of how many grams (g) of water vapour can pass through a square metre (m2) of the fabric from the inside to the outside in a 24 hour period. In the case of a 20k (20,000g) fabric, this would be 20,000 grams. The larger the number, the more breathable the fabric. In the shell jacket world though there is a bit of a trade-off, as the waterproofness goes up, often the breathability will go down, which in an active sport like mountain biking could end up making you just as wet from sweat as much as the rain. The Super Mica’s balance of the two is spot on.
And when you throw in large armpit zips for even more airflow, you’re onto a winner.
But it’s other little trick features like the Dura-Lite reinforcements that make this jacket rad. Backpack straps and waist belts can wear away your jacket’s water repellancy but the Super Mica features these cool additions in high wear areas like the shoulders…
… and the waist to protect it from rubbing and abrasion.
Throw in taped seams, two nicely sized pockets, contrasting waterproof zips and a nice sized hood and you have a winning jacket. The only catch is, it’s not a specific cycling jacket so the hood isn’t retractable, but again that’s a bit of a trade-off as retractable hoods often don’t have a good shape when up.
The weather has just completely shat itself here in Wellington, so I’ve already had the jacket out for a few rides and it’s performed admirably, but I’ll be wearing it a bunch more over the next month or two. A full review will be dropping in the July issue of Spoke.
You can email Allsports here to find your nearest stockist if you can’t wait for my full review.
Any retail price indication Caleb? Have got an older Marmot precip-plus jacket that’s been awesome but is now due for replacement. This could be a good option. Not so keen on that non-retractable hood though. The old one has a zip-away option that works well. But this looks worth a look.