51–60 of 174 posts
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Does the quality of shoe matters here ?
Yes, but in my experience the quality of your socks matters much more. A single wrinkle is gonna give you a nice blister within 5km. Get nice socks and pack blister bandages. Those things are like magic.
Lately I've been walking 20 km per day (~12.5 mi). Takes at least 3.5 hours. I try not to listen to any audio -- I just let my mind wander. To step it up a notch, I put on a weighted backpack (i.e. ruck). I'm typically carrying 30 lbs, sometimes 50. This raises the heart rate and roughly doubles the caloric burn. Low injury risk, too. Michael Easter's book "Comfort Crisis" has a nice chapter on rucking. I just wish i…
> 20 km per day (~12.5 mi) That is some serious distance. I remember thinking I would be able to do at least 25-35 km per day, a few years ago when I walked parts of the camino de Santiago in Spain. Blisters and destroyed feet in just a few days, not ever reaching 30 km per day I think.. How long did it take you to get used to this kind of distance daily?
does cycling count? walking hurts my back.
For many years, I cycled > 10 hours per week. But these days I only walk and haven't ridden a bike in over a year. Even though cycling can be a lot of fun, I don't really miss it. When walking you have a different relationship with the environment. You feel like a part of it. Cycling is much closer to driving than walking. You are just passing through. It's also far more dangerous so you have to focus more on the road which allows your mind to wander less than you can while walking. There are things that you notice while walking that you would never see on a bike. I once watched an epic battle between a caterpillar and a wasp. You realize there is so much more going on in the world than what we tend to focus on.
I have personally never enjoyed walking as a time to think or mentally relax. If anything, it stresses me out as my mind wonders around, obsesses, etc. I find that doing more strenuous activities or activities that require more attention, such as various yard and gardening work, do more to clear my mind. It’s the same thing with lifting weights or running. They are so monotonous and boring that I would much rather do…
I also refuse to be there much more than 1 hour. Years ago I used to have these 2 hour sessions of all kinds of stuff with half hour treadmill at the end, and you know what ... it gets boring and I give up. Better to do an hour 2-3 times a week for life than a ambitious thing that I give up.
I do my best thinking while walking. I wish more people did the same.. just the basic idea of letting a thought sink in for awhile. I will say that walking and staring at your phone is NOT the same thing as walking with your thoughts alone. Hell, I don't even put headphones on anymore while walking.
I'm the same way when cycling. Solved many of the tougher problems I've faced while commuting to and from work. I have yet to take the bike out with the only intention of clearing my mind, though.
I have personally never enjoyed walking as a time to think or mentally relax. If anything, it stresses me out as my mind wonders around, obsesses, etc. I find that doing more strenuous activities or activities that require more attention, such as various yard and gardening work, do more to clear my mind. It’s the same thing with lifting weights or running. They are so monotonous and boring that I would much rather do…
I am lifting weights to help combat fatigue so I sort of "have to" do it as a medicine. I treat it like a time to chill out. At least half the time is resting, and I only use the phone to check the time. Get some good music going and it is a fun way to relax and not think of much. I also refuse to be there much more than 1 hour. Years ago I used to have these 2 hour sessions of all kinds of stuff with half hour tread…
I also discovered that human memory is weird as heck. When I walk my mind is somehow mapping my physical location in the world to the content, down to the sentence. If I rewind an audio book I can fairly often remember where exactly I heard a particular sentence. The precise street corner or park trail I was on, to like a 10 feet precision. I do not otherwise have strong memory. WTF brain.
Does anyone else have this experience? I guess this is a peak into how 'memory palaces' work and how people memorize huge volumes of information?
I spend most of day in a single location and it really makes me want to try and change that. If my brain is spending all this freaking effort maintaining an index of knowledge mapped to GPS coordinates anyway, probably I should try to leverage some of this indexing.
I wonder if this applies on different levels. Is a one-classroom school possibly less effective than a school where each subject is learned in a different room, for example? If it is, what if you amped this up and had very fine-grained physical location changes. Alternatively does it actually need to be a different location? If I had projectors on all the walls in my room so it felt like a different location, could there be a similar effect? Or what about studying in a VR environment, a virtual walk?
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How do you have enough time for this? 20km/day is around 4 hours of walking even at above average speeds
No kids and never worked on someone else's schedule (mid 40s). I do a lot of email and conceptional work while walking so it's technically not leisure time.
But, I do have a family and meetings for my clients.
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> 20 km per day (~12.5 mi) That is some serious distance. I remember thinking I would be able to do at least 25-35 km per day, a few years ago when I walked parts of the camino de Santiago in Spain. Blisters and destroyed feet in just a few days, not ever reaching 30 km per day I think.. How long did it take you to get used to this kind of distance daily?
I have heard of the camino de Santiago from someone planning to do it. I just looked it up and it says you can choose one of many routes. Camino Frances being the most popular. Feel like this will be on my bucket list if I can ever get that fit :-).
Yes, I've done small parts of the route on two different occasions. First time I quit due to problems with my feet, the second time I quit after problems with the heat :-)
I never planned to go the full camino, as most of these routes are quite long. The one that starts in France is about 800 km (500 miles) I think, so that will be a full summer holiday and probably a few weeks off work at best. Not ideal to walk during the height of summer either, as the heat can be brutal.