Riding and Eye Protection

I've been wearing glasses since my teens, and it has been a mixed relationship. On the plus side, and in addition to correcting my deficient vision, I always have some form of eye protection against the wind, bugs, and dirt while riding. Thanks to automatic lens darkening technologies like Rapid-Light and Photo-Gray, I also have a defense against the sun. For the most part, I rather enjoy wearing glasses and like the way they look on me. What I don't like about glasses is the way they fog up in certain conditions, like when entering the indoors from the cold, or how they steam up in humid conditions; sometimes with sweat causing further distortions. But what I detest most about glasses is wearing them in the rain. Water collects not on one, but on two surfaces, significantly impairing my sight.

Riding in the rain comes with a certain increase in risk for those who do not rely on prescription glasses, but for those that do, that risk can only be greater in my opinion. I have strained my eyes many a time while riding in the rain, and have ridden practically blind in nighttime downpours. That is as high a risk as anything I've dared to do.

I tried wearing full face helmets, or helmets with face shields, but fogging and water leakage continued to cause me problems. Nor did it help that I found the constrained feeling of this type of protection just too much of a negative to bear. So then I had a go with products like Rain-X, which I liberally applied to both sides of my glasses (note: lenses were made of glass), and for a while I was happy. Too bad the application of Rain-X did not last very long before losing its effectiveness. I also found it somewhat difficult to polish the lenses free of residual marks, and that was very annoying to say the least.

My next purchase of over-glasses goggles looked very promising. The goggles made it finally possible for me to ride in the rain reasonably safely, day or night. If they had felt comfortable with the helmets I owned, then my search for effective eye protection would have been over at last. Instead, I found that the goggle's strap had to be worn under my half helmet, and the goggle itself barely fit under the helmet's peak. It seemed like I was forever having to adjust the goggles while riding, pushing them up from pressing too hard on my cheeks. The glasses they covered would sometimes shift as well, but there was no way I could do anything about that with just one hand. Perhaps a helmet designed with a snap on the back for the strap, and with more room above the forehead could have solved those problems, but then I found something much better.