After walking 1,776,239 steps for a total of 826.94 miles these shoes, which were my very first curbside pickup purchase, are being retired. Maybe you are thinking: In the world of blogs, writing about the end of life of your shoes is the best you’ve got? Well, back when I was 16 years old in 1979 there was no ubiquity of data regarding the minutiae of the mundane. Here in 2020, I can tell you that I paid $48.85 at Dick’s Sporting Goods on April 25th, and picked up my shoes at 3:05 p.m., because of the email confirmation that was sent to me almost instantaneously after a clerk put the shoes in my trunk. The order was first processed after PayPal transferred my money at 12:29:24 and, while the shoes were ready for pickup at 12:53, it would take me a while to get ready and drive the 8.5 miles. About 14 minutes after Caroline and I left we were at our location thanks to Google Maps. I checked in with a link in the confirmation email and about 10 minutes later was on my way home.

To be even a little more exact: I should have removed 8,738 steps of the 10,546 I walked that day as the first 4 miles were done before the trip to pick up new shoes, but that’s okay. The impact of the inaccuracy is negligible as if I told you that each mile cost 0.05907 cents or 0.05936 to walk it would still be essentially 6 cents per mile. At a per-step cost, this becomes an exercise in silliness though maybe this entire entry is but for the sake of completeness, my per-step cost figures in at 0.00002685 cents or 0.00002698 per step depending on which cost of mile one refers to. Come to think about it, I probably have enough information at hand to know the price of each breath I take.

By the way, I feel I got the value out of these shoes as it seems most walking shoes are rated for about 300-500 miles of activity. Obviously, I took these a lot farther than that and wore off a lot of sole but if I’m gonna pay almost $50 for a pair of shoes, I want to know they’ll serve me well.