Nike Mind 001 'blackened Blue'

Two uses. Post training: shorts or track pants, a hoodie, bare feet or thin socks, worn from the gym to the car and again at home while your feet decompress. Warm weather errands: linen or wide cotton trousers with a plain tee, the dark blue keeping the slide from looking like poolside kit. This is short distance footwear, so do not plan a day of walking in it. Size true, since a slide that is too big flaps and one that is too small presses the strap into the instep. Rinse after sweaty wear, dry fully before the next use, and keep them out of a hot car.

Nike is a different company now from the one that built its myths. Phil Knight stepped down as chairman in 2016, John Donahoe took over as chief executive in January 2020, and Nike veteran Elliott Hill later succeeded him, a return to leadership grown inside the business. Recovery footwear belongs to this newer chapter, where the brand is designing for the whole day around sport rather than for the moment of competition. The founding story still holds underneath it: a coach in Oregon who thought the shoes his runners were given did not respect what a body goes through. A slide built for tired feet is that concern, minus the stopwatch.

A slide is a strap and a footbed, and there is nowhere to hide. The strap has to hold across the instep without pressing on the top of the foot, and the footbed has to be contoured enough to stop the foot sliding forward and soft enough to be worth wearing on tired legs. Nike has spent its whole life arguing that a midsole should absorb load rather than transmit it, from Bill Bowerman's waffle sole through to the pressurised Air unit it made visible in 1987, and recovery product is that argument applied after the work rather than during it. Rinse and air dry the footbed, keep them out of prolonged sun so the foam does not harden, and never machine wash.