My Eyes Feel Great but My Legs Hate Me

I’ve been talking about doing two things for quite a while; I finally did both. Yes, one week ago today, I got contact lenses. And yesterday, I rode my bike to work.

OK, so if you’ve known me at all from about 4th grade up until a week ago, you know me as somebody who wears glasses. It’s all I’ve ever known. Never really cared about contacts. I wore my glasses during athletics, couldn’t see much when I went swimming and got used to cleaning my lenses on my shirt.

But I finally decided to give contacts a try. I’ve heard that vision is great with contacts, especially being able to see the periphery and not having the frames in the way. It also helped that rIAm got contacts and I saw her process. So anyway, bottom line, contacts are AWESOME!

I have never, ever, been able to see this well. At least not since 4th grade. This is like actual 20-20 vision. My eyes were corrected to 20-20, but c’mon, it wasn’t really 20-20, since I had to move my whole head to look at something in my peripheral vision. Heck, even to glance at something on my desk if I was looking at my computer screen meant moving my whole head. Now? All in focus, all the time.

It’s a freedom and improved vision I only considered in a theoretical way. But now it’s real. And I can wear sunglasses! I swear, these words and the screen are bigger now than they were with glasses. In fact, the only thing I don’t like about contacts is that I have to take them out at the end of the day. And the 12 hour max sometimes is just too short.

Another benefit… no glasses necessary while riding my bike! In fact, drumroll please, I can wear sunglasses while riding my bike! I can even get those wrap-around kind that block the air (or at least a lot of it) from my eyes, keeping my eyes from drying out while riding. Su-weet!

Last summer I rode my bike a lot, but it’s been in the garage all winter. I rode over to a Mexican market to get some goodies recently, but otherwise, it’s been idle. With all the stuff going on in my life right now, taking a couple hour break to go riding hasn’t been practical. So I kept threatening to ride my bike to work (after all, I have to get there somehow).

And so, yesterday, I made good on that threat, with fancy-shmancy $10 wrap-around sunglasses. I could see so well, the sun and wind nicely blocked, the lake sparkling on my left, beautiful city to the right – it was awesome. Well, from the waist up. Because from the waist down, my body hated me.

Not having riden to work before, and with rIAm’s trademark “don’t get dead” line in my head (which extends to injury pre-wedding), I took the safe route, the Lakefront Trail. This is an absolutely awesome stretch of bike path, right along Lake Michigan. But going this route added roughly 5 miles (that’s 8k for you metric-philes out there) to my commute. And the simultaneous best and worst thing about the trail: you don’t stop.

I have no doubt that my legs are totally out of shape for a 15 mile ride. And I probably pushed it too much early on. And my nose ran a little, which affected my breathing, and I should’ve stopped and cleared that out better. But still. I know I can do the ride, I don’t need to make my commute 50% longer than necessary. And it took me an hour and twenty minutes. Even a bad day on the El is faster than that.

I decided it was back to the streets for the ride home. A former colleague of mine used to live two blocks south me and his route was south on Damen to Clybourn, and then Halsted south to 35th, and then east to State. Which makes sense — it’s certainly better than Damen all the way south. But Clybourn is a busy street and with parked cars, it’s a tight fit for a bike. And drivers don’t pay much attention to bicyclists. But the other nuissance is that Halsted has 3 bridges with open metal grates. Not impassable, but still not my preference.

Not thinking of a better route, or noticing one on the Chicago Bike Map, I decided to take 33rd over to Halsted, and then turn left either at Clybourn or a straight street further north. It was clear immediately that I was making much more rapid progress than I did in the morning, even though my legs started tired. And I was still not looking forward to the open metal grates and North/Clybourn area.

But, as I was crossing over the Kennedy, I realized “I can turn on Milwaukee!” The somewhat crazy Halsted/Grand/Milwaukee intersection was coming up, and I remembered that Milwaukee has some bike lane (as does Halsted, which is why it’s a good north-south route), but also isn’t as congested as the other diagonals. I also knew I’d have a bike lane when I reached Damen, and no metal grates. It took a bit of manuevering to make the left onto Milwaukee, but I felt home free. And really, I was; it was a great route. I just had to manuever the reprehensible Damen/Fullerton/Elston just-barely-doesn’t-meet-as-one intersection.

My legs were shot, but it took about an hour to get home. If I can do this with some regularity, my legs will build up strength and endurance. I estimated the route home to be 10 miles, and at roughly an hour, that’s 10 m.p.h. I don’t know for sure, but it seems like it wouldn’t be too hard to get that to 12-15 m.p.h., and then the ride is 40-50 minutes — or, roughly the same as the El.

And that means I could bike 20 miles a day without interfering with anything I have to do. And rIAm says I look super cool with my sunglasses, so I’ve got that going for me too.