This past weekend, my daughter Cadence completed her first race—a kids’ bike race in our hometown. Cadence had been asking her father and me for quite some time if she could sign up for a race, and we had our eyes peeled for an opportunity. The challenge, as we quickly found, is that there are not a lot of races designed for children as young as 4. The fact that a kids’ bike race was happening no more than a half mile from our front door seemed nothing short of fate, especially since my husband Tim and I met in a bike shop parking lot and pretty much fell in love with each other after many months of riding together.

The week or so leading up to the race, Cadence’s excitement could not be contained. She wanted to “train” for the race and took any chance she had to ride her bike. On the day of the race, she even rode her bike from our house to the race start. But the minute she approached the starting line, Cadence began to cry. We tried to calm her down, to tell her that even mommy and daddy are nervous at the start of every race, but the tears kept coming. As the race director announced, “30 seconds to go,” her cries grew to wails, and I did what probably any mother would do: I encouraged her to listen to her gut and decide for herself if she wanted to race or not.

In the end she said she wanted to race, but only if I would run alongside her. So, with flip-flops on my feet and pushing my youngest daughter Scarlett in the jogging stroller, I ran alongside Cadence as she competed in her bike race. By the end, Cadence had calmed down and enjoyed the event. As she rode back toward the starting line to claim her finisher’s medal, I told her how proud I was of her for overcoming her nerves.

It is natural to experience anxiety when trying something new. In Cadence’s case, even though she has been a spectator at many of the races my husband Tim and I have done, it still was a different feeling for her to be the one competing. Luckily, encouragement can go a long way to promote success.

In this spirit, our cover focus this month hopefully provides surgeons who have not entered into the realm of glaucoma management and microinvasive glaucoma surgery (MIGS) the encouragement to give it a try. Of course it can be daunting to know where to start with MIGS, but the following articles might act as jumping-off points to get you up to speed and eventually to become masters of these techniques.

—Laura Straub, Editor-in-Chief