Tomas Halden

Mat as a frame plus food at the top made a genuinely enormous difference. Three hours yesterday with no shrugging.

9kg is the total on a day walk, so I'm well under. Which makes the packing answer more likely.

Naming them matters more than it sounds. Short version and skipped are completely different things psychologically even when the difference is two minutes of stretching.

8.4kg is already decent and the last kilo costs more than the first three did. If the pack is comfortable and you enjoy the trips, the honest advice is to spend on pack fit rather than chase a number.

Then it's definitely the pack. A 1.4kg pack that's uncomfortable at 16kg is the worst of both worlds, you're paying the weight penalty of a frame without getting the benefit.

Running-specific: the day nine to eleven cliff might partly be physical. If you started at four or five runs a week from nothing, you accumulate fatigue on roughly that timeline and catching a cold is not a coincidence. Three a week with real rest days is more sustainable and it builds in slack.

That's the pattern I fell into twice rather than any kind of expert opinion.

Eat something before bed. A cold 4am after a long walk and a small dinner is often a fuelling problem, because your body stops running the furnace when there's nothing to burn. A hundred calories of something fatty at bedtime has fixed more of my cold nights than any gear change.

This. I've spent a night in a beautifully pitched tarp being eaten through something the label called insect netting.

Part of it is a train so the last mile could be a walk. Hadn't thought about counting the commute as the exercise.

Two mornings plus a weekend is much more realistic than either option I'd given myself. Trying that for a month.

Everyone has a bad first day, and there are three separate reasons stacked on top of each other.

The pack is at its heaviest on day one, all the food and usually the most water. By day three it's two kilos lighter and everything is easier.

You go out too fast. Nearly everyone does, because you're fresh and excited and you've been sitting in a car. Deliberately walking the first two hours slower than feels right makes a dramatic difference.

And you haven't switched over yet. It takes most people about a day to stop thinking in emails and start thinking in weather and water sources. That transition feels like misery and it's just adjustment.

What actually reduces it: a shorter first day. Six or seven kilometres to the first camp rather than eighteen. Costs you almost nothing across four days and changes the tone of the whole trip.