I've got a Giro Encinal. The visor is pretty generously sized.

http://www.giro.com/usa/cyc_encinal.html

I suspect different people have different results. Contacts just get better and better. I forget I'm wearing mine. Only take a moment to get in and out. Simple these days.

I don't wear glasses when commuting. At high speeds on my road bike I will. In the rain, no trouble. Just wear contacts and blink. Glasses are a pain. Contacts are a minor bother twice a day. Even in my dust filled shop I have no trouble with them.

But others are sure to get different results.

Honestly, glasses don't bother me at all, even in the rain. Also, I'm really cheap. Glasses cost me $350 or so, and last me 4 years. They'd last longer but the last set started losing their coatings then and I had to replace them.

Also, I had a few bad experiences when I got something in my eye and the contacts caused it to scratch my cornea. Also I had some trouble once while watching movies until early in the morning, had some drying, and caused some damage taking them out. Contacts may get better every year, but they'll never achieve the level of eye safety that glasses have.

About $5,000, all told. Money well spent.

i only go contacts. If snow and rain getting in your eyes is your concern, you can buy bike-specific glasses with clear lenses to keep the gunk out of your eyes...

thats a good bit more expensive than lasik around here but benifits outweigh costs. Iv'e got them sending me more info on it now. No more glasses/contacts woot, woot!!!

incorrect

LASIK. you might regret it. you might want to kill yourself if you lose your vision.

real life risks:
constant dry eye, loss of night vision...blindness...etc. real things to consider.

Have any of you switched to contacts just because of the issues of riding in the rain?

No. I got contact lenses before I got into cycling because I was tired of dealing with glasses in general.

Were you bothered by the rain now hitting your eyes?

I typically ride with eye protection (sunglasses with interchangeable lenses), but if it is raining, I sometimes take them off. To answer your question, like with most people, the eye lashes protect your eyes from a raindrop directly hitting, so no, I am not bothered in the slightest with rain against my face.

One thing you have to worry about though is dust. This is why I wear eye protection most of the time. Dust can really bother the eyes and can get under the contact lense and really cause some trouble. I also sometimes have problems with the lenses drying out. Usually this is after having sat at a computer all day and I am riding home. My eyes are dry to start with from the computer work, and the wind makes it worse. After a mile or so though, the waterworks catch up and I don't have a problem thereafter for the duration of the ride.

Was it worth it?

Contacts are worth it for me in cycling. It allows me to have full clarity all the way to the periphery of my vision and it lets me use sunglasses without the need for some sort of Rx lense or inserts. And, as you have noted, in the rain and mist (we have enough of that here in the PNW), I have the freedom of taking off all the eyewear and not being blind.

Did you eventually switch back to glasses?

If I make a switch away from contact lenses, it'll be to laser surgery. I actually dislike contacts - they are a hassle and they are omnipresent in my life, but I dislike them less than glasses. So, better of two evils, I guess.

so false. you have no idea what you're talkin' about. absolutely no idea.

Not false. Problems probably aren't very common but they do occur. Actually, I think night vision problems are pretty common.

http://www.lasermyeye.org/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=8

Actually, true, but extremely unlikely. The night vision one is the most common, and is reason enough for me to not do it. Even losing 1/2 magnitude of acuity is not acceptable to me.

I feel really sorry for the people who got RK back in the day. They've got seriously boned vision now.

I think you are the one in that situation. Night vision distortion is a _very_ frequent secondary effect, and the rest of them (up to total blidness) are much less likely, but still can happen, have happened and will happen from time to time.

As for

Well, eyelashes don't cover every angle, specially front coming drops (that are very likely if you are moving fast), however a rain drop is not painful (unless you have extreme cases of acid rain in your zone). But pray not to meet hail in your commute...

Personally, I use gas permeable contact lenses. Even when some dust gets in the lens, I simply let the eyes tear until they clear. Suck it up! ;) Generally, the lenses do clear in a minute or so, but sometimes remedial action, manually dislodging the lens, is necessary. I don't think I'll ever allow someone to cut on my eye. A few years ago, a new type on contact lens was developed that fit on the eye and corrected your vision during your sleep. Upon waking, you simply remove the lenses and your vision is corrected for at least 8 hours. At the moment, I can't remember the brand name, but I asked a doctor recently about them. He said that those type of contact lenses were called reverse geometry lenses, but I haven't verified it. Eventually, I'll go with a reverse geometry type of contact lens.

I wear glasses when I ride, and this is how I keep the rain from hitting them: http://www.rei.com/product/238313
I wear one of these under my helmet. The helmet causes the sides to fold down, creating a sort of 'tunnel', and the brim is big enough in front that, when pulled down a bit, blocks about 98% of the rain. The brim is biggest on an XL, and reduces in size on the smaller size hats. Mine is an XL, and the brim is quite big. Fits under my helmet easily, and is pretty warm as well. The folded over sides cover my ears, and do block some sound, but I can still hear cars ok. This is also one of the greatest waterproof hats ever, when not on the bike. Looks a little dorky under a helmet, but my head stays dry, as do my glasses.

I would love to get Lasik, unfortunately graduate students do not make much money :(

I wore glasses, then switched to contacts for about 20 yrs. They worked well. I was never bothered by rain or snow hitting my eyes, I would just blink it away. But I still often wore some kind of protective sunglasses, Gargoyles, Oakleys, Wiley-X, etc.

I went back to glasses when I started having problems related to snow blindness in bright sunlight. It got to the point where I had to wear sunglasses all the time if I were going to be out for a while. After going back to glasses this problem disappeared, so I chalked it up as being related to age and contacts.

Another problem that was developing with age while wearing contacts was farsightedness. It was becoming more difficult to read things closer than arms length. I could get bifocal glasses or contacts, but now I just take my glasses off when I want to see something small, up close. My vision is fine for that without correction.

My vision isn't so bad I can't ride without my glasses, so if it's foggy, drizzling or raining, I just put them in my pocket.

Considered laser surgery, but discarded that idea after a friend did it and lost his night vision. Which he eventually got back.

whatevs dude. i got my peepers done at the new england eye center at tufts university medical school here in boston. a few of the celtics have been lasiked there too. i can see like a freakin' owl at night. i would pay twice what i paid in a heartbeat.:beer:

Sounds like you have an excellent facility to go to there. Most people are not so lucky. I believe the vast majority of lasik is done at lasik mills where the dangers are either not talked about at all, or they're brushed off.

Nobody's saying these happen all the time, or even frequently. It depends on your own choices. To me, I'd rather wear glasses the rest of my life rather than take a 1 in 100,000 chance of making my eyes worse, or even worse, losing some night acuity.

Did you have your night vision carefully tested both before and after? There are two effects that people sometimes experience. One is losing some acuity (not being able to see in quite as dim light as before) and the other is improper correction of the periphery of the cornea; when your iris opens up at night and that part of the cornea comes into play, their vision goes to hell. So they can see very well in the light, but have bad and uncorrectable vision at night.

Again, it's not common, but it happens. If you weren't informed of these possible outcomes, then either you weren't listening carefully or your provider was not forthcoming. My doctor gave me a pamphlet when I asked about it, and it laid out all of this stuff.

All that said, I know several people who have gotten lasik, and all but one has better than 20/20 vision now, and the one that doesn't still has good enough vision to not really need glasses all the time.

But for me, glasses do not bother me in the least, and I can buy glasses for the rest of my life for less than what lasik currently costs. In fact, when I wore contacts, I probably spent more on protective glasses than I do on prescription glasses when I'm wearing them.

I just got used to the world being kinda blurry

i had a friend too who switch from glasses to contacts... same thing he answered to me... he has no plans on getting back to those glasses...