New shoes, new ferrules and new poles!

I realise that it has been several months since my last update. Plenty has been going on, so there will be a quick flurry of posts as a record of relevant things.

My shoes reached the end of their life back in October, looking like this:

The immediate observation is that the wear on both shoes is similar, which suggests that using my walking poles has helped my mobility, allowing both legs to behave similarly.

The dataset of shoe use now looks like this:

Shoe Date	Months
Sep-14
Apr-17	31
Nov-18	19
May-20	18
Oct-21	17
Dec-22	14
Nov-23	11
Jun-24	7
Nov-24	5
Oct-25	11

This also means that I'm back, roughly, on a pair of shoes per year. Once again the new pair are Karrimor. Previous post: https://hspjourney.blogspot.com/2024/10/symptoms-update-new-shoes.html

Also, a week or two ago I finished getting through another set of ferrules for my poles, with a similar wear pattern to last time:

This means that the rate of wear of ferrules is about a new set every 4 months. Previous post: https://hspjourney.blogspot.com/2025/08/ferrule-change-again.html

In the last month my poles have also failed, which was to do with the twist lock failing. I managed to get a different set in the Black Friday sale, but my initial thought is that I dont like the shape of the handle as much, which adds another factor into choosing poles.

I'm not minded to track poles as a dataset, although it is interesting to note that I had just over a year of use from the first ones. The new ones are collapsible, but in a different way. The first ones twisted and smaller sections slid up within larger sections, whereas the new ones are all more like a tent pole. In reality I had the original poles for quite a few years, but they had sat in a cupboard for a long time before getting them into use in late 2024.