The big squeeze: what to pack for an overnight trail run — theguardian.com

Packing light for an endurance event can seem like an insurmountable challenge. From fluids to food and kit, here’s how to get it rightI felt well prepped. My first serious trail run lay a week away. Madeira’s mountainous tracks and cliff-top coastline beckoned. Our route: the classic MIUT ultra spanning the Portuguese island in the north Atlantic. But we weren’t crazy. We would do it in two stages rather than in one, crazy-goat go. And we would hack off the first 35km. So that left around 80km over two days. Sure, the gradient chart for the first day looked like a heart attack victim’s cardiograph (3,600m of ascent). But, as I say, I felt good. I had trained hard. I wasn’t carrying any niggles. Then, with a simple email, everything changed. The message was from Charlie, one of our Madeira trail-running trio. Of the three of us, he was the only one with any experience of serious long-distance running. He owns a high-end travel company in Morocco and talks casually of jogging in the Atlas mountains. He had already won our ear. Then I learned he had done the Marathon des Sables, a seriously gruelling six-day race in the Sahara, and our respect rose inordinately. So when he sent an email with the subject heading, “Everything weighs something”, I was primed to listen. Continue reading...

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