Category: Walking

The Temptation of the Bus

~ Veselin ~ 11 Comments

One of my frequent struggles when doing the 10k steps journey is the series of temptations to give up on the walk. Here’s how it works. You walk on the sidewalk, and you walk by a bus stop. The moment you’re there, a bus stops, and it goes to the co-working space. It will be there in 5 minutes, and if I kept walking, it would take me 20.

This was the evil bus that tempted me today. As it’s clearly written on it, the direction is hell.

Lots of the reasoning behind my radical walking approach is that walking only doubles the time it takes to get anywhere, compared to a bus or a car. You need to get to the car, clean it from leaves, drive in the traffic, find parking, pay for parking, and so on, and so on. However, if you are already at the bus stop, and there’s a bus conveniently waiting for you to hop on, there’s no cleaning, waiting, parking or anything. It’s like a teleport to the final destination. The only reason to keep walking would be that you want to walk, you want the pain, and the fitness that comes with it.

I chose the hard path because I value persistence and I have a long-term goal of achieving the 10k, and eventually being able to climb Vihren again. If I took the bus today, tomorrow I’ll be tempted by a bus that will arrive in 1 minute. Or a taxi. Or my car that’s parked right in front of the building. The path back to the car brain mentality would be wide open.

The Morning Walk

~ Veselin ~ 8 Comments

I keep insisting on reaching an annual average of 10K steps per day. Over the 2 years, I crawled to the goal by slowly replacing car time with walk time. The rule of the thumb is that 30 minutes of driving in the city can be replaced by 1h of walking, reducing the overall time cost of walking. However, I fully eliminated the city driving without even reaching an average of 8K.

I also do weekly hikes. These started with weekend walks in the park. Over the summer, we switched to doing hikes with my wife. The hikes can easily exceed 20k steps and move the average significantly up. However, it’s not possible to do that every week. Weather, babysitting, and health issues seems to make hiking unreliable.

The system I experiment with right now is the morning walk. Start the day with 7-8K, and then it almost doesn’t matter if I move at all, or if I do the weekly hike. The 10K average gets achieved. This approach is not without problems as well and I’m not sure it can be sustained.

  • It’s 8 am right now, 2°C outside, it’s cold
  • Dogs walkers everywhere. Stray dogs have not been fed by their humans. It feels unsafe. I was attacked once already, thankfully by a slow pug of some kind
  • Rush hour traffic – toxic fumes near the streets greatly limit the possible paths
  • It hurts. I’ve not figured that part out bit there’s pain.

The morning walk has other advantages – I can process the news and requests I received overnight, think about who does what and when. I feel like it slightly improves my productivity.

So, although the system with the morning walk consistently moves the average over 10k and adds processing time, I feel like I can’t sustain it. I’m not sure if it will be the cold weather, the darkness, a dog bite, or something else that will end it.

Nike Wildhorse 8 for Walking

~ Veselin ~ 4 Comments

I walked about 3000 kilometers over the last 12 months. Walking is my exercise+meditation combo, and I plan to keep doing it. My goal is 10K steps/day. I also do some mild weekly hikes, that have recently started reaching the 20K step mark.

When I started walking daily, I used regular Sketchers shoes with memory foam. These were very convenient for driving and hanging out in Starbucks but turned out to be unsustainable for longer walks. Switching away was a tough choice. However, my wife, who is chasing a similar walking goal as me, started having the same type of pain I had. So we decided to try new shoes.

What I got was the Nike Wildhorse 8. I didn’t know these are running shoes when I bought them. I guess most people who buy these shoes don’t run and walk instead. So I walked in mine until they started breaking. Here is my experience from walking about 2000 km with them.

Nike Wilhorse 8, the old and the new.

Walking

  • They’re very comfortable in most seasons, except the coldest days of the winter
  • The slightest drops of rain go through and reach your sock, which I find pleasant
  • They keep your feet cold and dry from sweat
  • The sole has no visible signs of wear after no less than 2k km.
  • The pain in my feet fully disappeared in about 3 weeks of use, and started coming back after ~10 months, perhaps due to insole damage
  • The visible damage on the shoes after a 11 months of chasing steps every day is minimal
  • Sufficiently comfortable for driving and shopping, no sacrifices over the Sketchers

Hiking

The shoes are light and the sole bends a lot. This has some pros and cons for my use:

  • On a road like the one on the photo above, I would avoid the stones. The traditional hiking boots have hard soles and you can step wherever you like
  • They’re light and you don’t need to think about them
  • Okay on gravel
  • Slippery on snow, don’t ask why I did snow hiking with them. It’s very easy for the snow to get in and then it hurts

Verdict

I didn’t use these shoes for their intended purpose. Can’t run yet. But they’re great for walking and easy hikes. I’m happy with my purchase and got a new pair.

❤️

Update 03/2025

The second pair of shoes broke after about 3 months of 10k/day use (the other 2-3 since I bought them I wore winter shoes). The first signs of insole damage was visible after less than a month and they started hurting not long after. I don’t know why the first pair lasted much longer. My use didn’t change.

💔

Accidental Hike

~ Veselin ~ 9 Comments

It was supposed to be a quiet day. We went to IKEA, had meatballs, got a teapot because one of our kids is drinking lots of tea. Tested all the couches. Comfy. All of that amounted to less than 5k steps, which is pretty poor for a weekend day. How do we get to 10k?

So we dropped some options, like “Let’s just do some steps up there in the mountain, take a horizontal path for just half an hour.” But it’s cold today, maybe go higher up where it’s more open and sunny.

One thing lead to another and we reached the top.

The weather was perfect, cold enough to not sweat. Warm enough to not need winter clothing.

Arena 8888

~ Veselin ~ Leave a comment

Arena Sofia, formerly known as Arena Armeec, is now called Arena 8888. It was quite a surprise to see the name change. 8888 self-identifies as an entertainment website but is actually an online casino. Our society is pushing back against online gambling at the moment and this contract can be considered a bit like an insult.

I think having a sponsorship will be good for the area, which suffers from decay. Turn around by 30 degrees to the right from that spot and it’s like the Zombies attacked and left 50 years ago. So, congratulations to the winners 🙂