| Hundreds gearing up to Cycle for Sight | | Print | |
| Written by Laura Di Mascio |
| Thursday, 08 April 2010 13:45 |
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One third of the participants are vision impaired and will ride the event on tandem bikes. These two-rider bikes can be a challenge, event co-founder Erin George told TheDailyPlanet.com. “When you’re cycling, you really do things instinctively and out of habit and you just do it, you don’t have to communicate it and articulate it the way you do on a tandem bike. It’s just learning to vocalize your actions before you take them and that’s a bit of a challenge,” she said. “I also found it a little bit personally challenging. I don’t really take a back seat to anything in my life, I’m very much a get-out-there-and-go -do-it, and so for me to be on the back of the tandem bike is a bit of a mind flip, but it’s better than not cycling at all.” The Cycle for Sight will take riders from Toronto to Collingwood. George said last year’s ride was a huge success, raising more than $84,000, with only 48 riders. This year the event has grown a lot. Cycle for Sight has added Ottawa and Victoria to the list of participating cities, and George said the national goal is to reach $175,000 this year. With $47,000 already raised and 145 registered riders, George said hitting that goal won’t be a problem. “We’ve almost tripled in size and its very exciting that we’ve grown so large in only our second year in existence. “We’re just getting bigger and better and it’s really exciting,” said George. “We’d love to get more people involved in cycling, create more opportunities for blind and vision impaired people to cycle and to harness their families and friends to raise funds for this important vision research and to prove to ourselves that we can reclaim some of the activities that we’ve lost.” Cycle for Sight co-ordinator Jaime Alexanderson told TheDailyPlanet.com the event is a great way to promote inclusiveness. “It’s quite a unique event in terms of empowering the visually impaired and blind community, allowing them to cycle a long distance like this is quite unique,” said Alexanderson. “It’s a pretty exciting event.” Alexanderson said Cycle for Sight started through four friends who were all losing their sight and wanted to do something. George, 33, has been living with retinitis pigmentosa (RP) for eight years now. RP is a rare genetic eye disease, in which the cells in your eyes are dying, essentially affecting your peripheral vision. George said it also affects your ability to see at night, to distinguish colours, contrast, and depth perception. After noticing changes in her eyesight in her early twenties, and seeing several eye doctors, George was diagnosed with RP when she was 25. There are 30,000 people with the RP in Canada and 3,000 more are diagnosed yearly, according to the Foundation Fighting Blindness. For a cyclist, George said the news was overwhelming. “When I moved to Toronto, I didn’t feel a part of Toronto until I got my bike and started biking around the city. When my vision loss forced me off the road and forced me off my bike it was really devastating,” said George. “Getting a tandem bike and starting to ride on a tandem bike was a way for me to reclaim that lost activity.” Her passion for cycling led to the creation of Cycle for Sight. Now in its second year, George said the event is very important. “Its fundraising for treatments and cures that might one day halt the progress of my vision loss and other people’s vision loss, and maybe even restore some of the lost sight,” said George. “Equally important is that it’s something to put my energy into, to harness my frustration, my fear, my anger, my hope, all of those emotions that come with being diagnosed with RP and facing a disability, can be channelled into an activity that’s positive.”
Erin George discusses why she thinks Cycle for Sight is so important. |
