He does 25 to 30km days in the Cairngorms with a 14kg pack and has done for a decade, and he watched me weighing tent pegs with genuine pity. My days are 15 to 20km and I am at 7.8kg base. I cannot tell whether he is right that fitness swamps the difference, or whether he is just strong enough to have never noticed the cost.
Ask him whether he would carry an extra 6kg of gravel for no reason. He would not, so he does believe weight matters, he just draws the line where his current kit already sits. Everyone does that.
He is half right in a way that is worth taking seriously. Above a certain fitness, weight stops determining whether you finish and starts determining how you feel on day four and whether you get injured in year ten. Both of those are invisible on a single strong weekend, which is exactly why he has never noticed.
Then honestly at your distances he has a point. The gap between 7.8 and 14 is huge on day six of a hut-less traverse and fairly academic on a Saturday to Sunday.
Day four is the part I have never actually tested. Everything I do is two or three nights.
The failure mode of your position is a spreadsheet with 60 rows and a person who has not been out since March. I have been that person. I spent one winter optimising from 8.1 to 7.2kg, which is a bag of sugar, and did four fewer trips than the year before because gear became the hobby. He is wrong about the physics and right about the pathology.
Bag of sugar is the phrase I am stealing. It reframes a whole winter of cottage-brand purchases very efficiently.
I own the heavy setup and the light one and swap by trip. Below about 9kg loaded I stop thinking about the pack at all, which is worth real money to me. Above about 15kg my knees complain on descents for two days afterwards and I am 46. Neither number is universal, but there is a threshold for everyone and finding yours is the whole exercise.
@two_hills_up · 6mo ago
The failure mode of his position is that heavy packs quietly shrink your options. You do not skip the extra ridge because you decided against it, you skip it because the idea of it makes you tired. I did the same route two years apart at 13kg and at 8kg, same fitness, and the second time I added a summit on a whim. Nothing on paper explains that, but it is the actual benefit.
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