As usual, I head out without a plan. But staying at home is unbearable when there's a meadow outside my window, forests above the meadow and, above the forests, mountain ridges – the ridges of my Jeseníky. All I've got is a rough direction. An idea, a hunch of where I'd like to go. But I don't know the route, the destination or the distance. I'd love to just shoot off and run. With nothing – just shorts, a T-shirt and trainers. Now that's freedom! The trouble is, I probably can't fuel this non-plan and this uncounted distance on blueberries picked along the trail. I have to put a few shackles on my freedom. I have to take a pack.
You can't set off on a run into the unknown with just 300 ml of water on your waist. The Jeseníky may be tiny mountains, but they're mountains all the same. A storm rolls in, hunger hits, and eventually darkness falls. Anything can happen. And how glad I'll be then to be carrying a dry T-shirt, a jacket, waterproof socks, a head torch and two or three spare bars on my back.
And all things considered, the pack actually ended up giving me freedom on my runs.
With a pack, you see, I managed to discover a new sport. A kind of duathlon, really. I packed climbing shoes and a bit of rope and jogged from crag to crag. On each one I climbed something easy, and that way I could run maybe twenty kilometres and climb five or six routes. The old-school climbers would of course have called it normal training – and they probably climbed in whatever they ran in. But with modern gear, I gave it a modern name:
Climbrunning.
Only my old pack kept bouncing on my back the whole time, so innocently, as if nothing was wrong, until the shoulder straps had worn grooves into my neck. Ouch! Admittedly, it wasn't really a running pack. Whereas the Rab Aeon LT is. So I put a bit more trust in it.
And it still managed to surprise me.
At first glance it's not one of those hugging race vests. It simply looks like a pack. Small and compact, the kind you'd happily take on a hike. A pack that fits more than a 90-gram windbreaker and three gels.
But for all its "ordinariness", the Rab Aeon LT has the same – or at least very similar – shoulder straps as a running vest. Plus two stretchy chest straps and a hip belt. So it sits well on your back. It doesn't even wriggle much or bounce up and down when you're running downhill. Of course, you'll notice a little movement – with 18 litres of volume it's probably impossible to eliminate. And yes, running vests fit like they're sewn on, but then they don't have that kind of capacity.
Taking its cue from running vests, though, the Rab Aeon LT has pockets on the shoulder straps for a soft flask, a phone and an energy bar. And then there are those big stretch pockets on the sides. Brilliant! You just reach in mid-run, fish out a headband or sunglasses and carry on. You don't even stop. Superb!
Do-it-all gear tends to be good for nothing. And specialised gear – apart from the one thing it's made for – tends to be good for nothing too. Some people like it that way – one pack for running, another for cycling, another for hiking. Others see it as a waste. That's up to each of us. The Rab Aeon LT is primarily a running pack. But because its volume and build set it apart from classic running vests, you can just as easily take it on the bike. Or on a shorter hike. Or for some climbrunning.
These features come in handy here, there and everywhere:
You might be wondering how Rab – a brand that until now only made clothing and sleeping bags – could come up with a good running pack just for the fun of it. But in reality, the Aeon LT isn't just Rab, it's also Lowe Alpine, which has been making packs since 1967. The two brands belong to the same company and their products overlap. So this (not just) running pack, too, has well-thought-out features tested over the years:
So hurry off to the mountains. With the Aeon, it's pretty good fun.
