At home in Sliven, Haidushki Igri includes a challenge I had been thinking about: carrying a heavy wine sack up Haidushka Puteka. I wanted to find out what that sort of weight felt like on the trail.
My version used a backpack weighing 43 kilos. I knew a pack would carry very differently from a wine sack on the shoulders, so this was my own attempt at understanding the effort. At around 70 to 72 kilos myself, I was carrying roughly sixty per cent of my body weight.
The outing covered 4.6 kilometres and about 600 metres of elevation. I took two short water breaks. Moving time was two hours and eighteen minutes; altogether, I was out for about three hours.
My legs felt fine, and so did my breathing. The heat was what slowed me down most. Under that pack, I had plenty of time to notice it.
I got up, came back down and was glad I had tried it. It answered a small question I had been carrying around about a tradition from home.