JOURNAL
REFLECTION
REFLECTION
·
18 APR 2025
·
6 MIN READ
WHAT FASTPACKING TAUGHT US ABOUT REST
The first night we covered 34km. The second, 28. By the third we had slowed to 18km — not from fatigue, but from something harder to name. The terrain had started to require attention we hadn’t budgeted for.
The first night we covered 34km. The second, 28. By the third we had slowed to 18km — not from fatigue, but from something harder to name. The terrain had started to require attention we hadn’t budgeted for.
Fastpacking — moving through mountain terrain at pace with a minimal pack and overnight capability — is a discipline that has grown significantly in the past decade. The pitch is simple: more ground, less weight, more freedom. The reality, as with most things in the mountains, is considerably more textured than the pitch.
THE MATHEMATICS OF EFFICIENCY
When you move fast, you create efficiencies that are easy to see — more kilometres per day, more terrain covered, a kind of momentum that feels like progress. What is less visible is what you are trading. The details of a landscape that you pass through at 6km/h are qualitatively different from those visible at 3km/h. The wildlife, the water sources, the micro-variations in rock type and soil and plant community — all of it blurs into backdrop.
The mountain does not reward efficiency. It rewards attention.
WHAT SLOWING DOWN REVEALED
By the third day of our traverse, when our pace had dropped involuntarily, something shifted. We started noticing the things we had been passing: a small spring at 1,600m, marked on no map, coming from a fissure in limestone. A section of ridge that offered a natural shelter in three-sided rock, almost architectural. A herd of wild horses on the plateau above Epirus that we would have run straight past at pace.
Rest, it turns out, is not a failure state. It is a perceptual mode — the condition under which certain kinds of attention become possible. The mountains are full of detail that is only available to people who are moving slowly enough to receive it. The fastest lines through terrain are often the most impoverished ones.
WHAT WE CHANGED
We still move fast. The physical discipline of efficient mountain movement is genuinely valuable — it gives you access to more terrain, more conditions, a wider operating range. But we now build what we call ‘attention stops’ into our itineraries: moments that are not contingent on pace or progress, where the goal is simply to be in the place we have arrived at. Often thirty minutes. Occasionally much longer.
The paradox we have arrived at: the faster you are capable of moving, the more valuable it is to practice not moving. Competence creates the conditions for genuine rest. Without the fitness to have gotten there, the view means less.
