Fight blinding diseases and get some exercise in the dead of Wisconsin winter!  You can do both by putting together an indoor cycling team and joining the annual Cycle for Sight Fundraiser.

Here’s how Cycle for Sight works:

• Team captains or individuals sign up at http://www.cycleforsight.wisc.edu.  
• You’ll be assigned a riding time at the UW Natatorium (Nat) and the South East Recreational Facility (SERF).
• Team members ride, with spinning instructor guidance or at their own pace, for about 50 minutes each. Each team rides for a total of four hours.
• Efforts will be made to schedule riders on a team simultaneously, although there may be exceptions. If you sign up as an individual, you’ll be assigned to a team.

The University of Wisconsin is an international hub for vision research, with investigators across campus researching various aspects of both healthy and impaired vision. Many of them work with the McPherson Eye Research Institute (ERI) a cross-departmental institute which aims to develop new approaches to vision research by bringing together investigators in different disciplines.

The money your team raises will go to help McPherson ERI researchers investigate cures and treatments for blinding diseases such as macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa, glaucoma, Usher syndrome and diabetic retinopathy.  All are diseases of the eye (and sometimes more) which can lead to blindness or severe vision loss.