The Present's So Bright

I drove between Washington state and Iowa four times while in graduate school. On these long drives, tears would often fill my eyes involuntarily. Why was that? Could it have been the beauty of the landscape assaulting my senses? Could I have subconsciously been feeling the the loneliness of the sparsely populated plains and rolling hills, which gave way eventually to the striking yet bleakly jagged mountain vistas of the Northwest?

No. It was because I wasn’t wearing sunglasses.

And the same thing that happened to my eyes while driving can happen to your eyes while you’re out for a long run, or a hike, or a bike ride. In fact, much worse can happen. Just take a look at this page from the National Eye Institute. Cataracts? Macular degeneration? Pterygium? No thanks! Then again even mentioning such nasty business is probably overselling it, because really it all comes back to a basic truth: the sun is bright, and staring at bright things hurts.

That’s where these Nike sunglasses come in. They make bright things less bright. But that’s not to say they’re some basic-tinted-ass garbage. No way! They’re polarized. What does that mean? I’ll let noted science journal Wikipedia explain:

Polarization (also polarisation) is a property applying to transverse waves that specifies the geometrical orientation of the oscillations.

Uh… okay… great. Let’s read a little bit further, shall we?

Light or other electromagnetic radiation from many sources, such as the sun, flames, and incandescent lamps, consists of short wave trains with an equal mixture of polarizations; this is called unpolarized light. Polarized light can be produced by passing unpolarized light through a polarizer, which allows waves of only one polarization to pass through.

Sure, sure. Cool. So, to put it in layman’s terms, polarization is the process of taking gross chewy lots-o-pulp light and reducing it to the much smoother and more pleasant no-pulp light. Or something. If you can tell, the “graduate school” I mentioned above wasn’t in a science-related field.

Anyway, tl;dr: when you exercise outside it means exposure to the sun, which can cause anything from discomfort to major eye problems, so you should wear these sunglasses to protect yourself.

Have I covered everything?

Good!

Now, please let me know exactly how stupid my polarization-as-orange-juice metaphor was in the comments.