Originally Posted by
jimmuller
Thanks for all the input. This site was interesting.
It would have been nice to see more about their packing, which did seem quite minimal. They appear to have done no food preparation.
There is about a 1000 pages in their various books, that are quite worthwhile. As a guy with a mountaineering background, I always saw their stuff/ultralite in a performance to weight way. But some of their later writings hammer home that their choices are comfort oriented, they are not asking you to suffer for higher performance. Which makes sense, since I don't recall suffering myself... Of course lowering the weight is a huge benefit when it comes to comfort also. RJ didn't invent this stuff it has been around for decades, but is currently HOT.
The overview is in this book. The basic idea is to get all your basic gear down to one small pack that weighs about 8 pounds, each. All your questions will be answered in this book though it is mostly from the backpacking perspective. But it is much easier for a cyclist to do since the cyclist normally passes shops and supplies. Though you need to have some minimal supplies/tools for the bike, that a backpacker would not have an equivalent list for.
Over the last 30 years there has been an inversion. Backpackers used to have the heavy gear. If we sold a special tent for a cyclist back around 1980, it would have been the lightest one in the store by a margin, yet the backpacker actually carries his gear on his back. Today, the backpacker's gear can be featherweight. The cyclist, on the other hand can have racks and bags, before anything actually gets on the bike, that weigh 20 pounds by themselves. That makes a certain amount of sense given that a bike is a rolling wheel barrel of sorts, but it is also a little odd that weight management has slipped that far.
http://www.amazon.com/Trail-Life-Jar...1846177&sr=8-1
This book seems like the definition of overkill, but it is actually quite worthwhile in giving a graduate level course on sleeping in a tent/tarp. Pricing is better on the Ray site
http://www.amazon.com/The-Ray-Way-Ta...1846177&sr=8-4
This book has a lot of practical advice, some of it a little gritty. There is an interesting section on food, and the approach might be adaptable to your needs.
http://www.amazon.com/Ultralight-Bac...1846177&sr=8-5