Tag: blogging

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.

Dodger by Terry Pratchett

~ Veselin ~ 1 Comment

Just wow.

Late 90s or early 2000s, I was part of an IRC fan club of Terry Pratchett, called #ankh-morpork. I maintained a website built with html and iframes, dedicated to his works and the IRC channel. As part of this, I translated (poorly) a short story, a pretty grim one, and also pretty short, called Theatre of Cruelty. It showed poverty and death. The Discworld series shows cheerfulness, life, and dodging the bullet. It has trolls, dwarves, vampires and such, living together. But the Theater of Cruelty was just sad, grimdark, cruel. There was no hope in that story.

Dodger is a romance in the Theatre of Cruelty world. One that threatened to be a Romeo and Juliet story. We can speculate how much of Dodger was a result of Pratchett’s declining health but back in 1993, Terry and Lyn Pratchett were already producing that kind of works. Like sticky spots on a clean white table cover. The increased darkness of the Discworld series felt like a gradient, starting with the The Colour of Magic, with 100% cheerfulness and 0% darkness, and ending with the pure horror of his last works.

Dodger was published in 2012. It can be appreciated with no prior knowledge of Discworld. But the final fifth star requires some background. The language is shocking compared to his previous books. It has romance, which is also quite unusual. We had the grimdark world in 1993, long before 2007 when he was diagnosed with Alzheimer. And Tiffany kissed the Wintersmith in 2006.

Speaking of which, there are maybe 2 or 3 of the Discworld books I missed, and Wintersmith is one of them.

5/5, a great book. A blast from the past, and beautifully published with hard covers.