Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
It’s been awhile 🙂 I post photos of the bean soup that’s sold in the Cherni Vrah shelter as a mark of achievement that I managed to get there one more time.
The mountain was moist, slippery and foggy today. It rained a bit and I even had a chance to walk in hail for about a minute or two. Thankfully, no thunders. Found some berries.
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.
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.
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.
The shoes are light and the sole bends a lot. This has some pros and cons for my use:
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.
❤️
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.
💔
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.
Bansko is changing.
It used to be a small town with an old city. Then the ski zone came with thousands of new hotels, growing faster than the infrastructure. It had lots of people in the winter but was a muddy ghost town in the summer. Now the central area is expanding with paved walking streets that make it a summer resort as well.
The digital nomads and hipsters have found it. It has multiple co-working spaces. An abandoned hotel turned to a co-living space. The central square has daily events. People everywhere.
The success infected the nearby villages as well. Banya has multiple 4 and 5* hotels with mineral water.
I can see us going back with the goal to climb Vihren again. Not sure when. The summer season is over.
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