alt Hacker NewsRelated, it's wild what the porters on the Inca Trail carry. Both the weight and the pace they move. We'd get up and start hiking after breakfast, the porters pack up camp, start hiking 30-60 min after us, fly-by us mid-morning, and have a cooked lunch ready by the time we get to the lunch spot. Repeat again for dinner/night. The trail itself isn't technically challenging, just lots of elevation gain/loss each day and at a high enough altitude to make unacclimatized people feel pretty bad.
I was hiking in Nepal a couple years ago. I regularly saw porters carrying 85kg (187 lbs) of wood on there backs up the mountain trails (pic I took: https://imgur.com/a/ahJhoi9). I asked my Nepali guide how much he can carry, and he said "I can carry you!" I'm 195cm (6'5"), and weighed about 120kg (264 lbs) at the time, and this guy was maybe half my size. I told him to prove it, so he asked me to get on his back, which I did, and then he picked me up and started running. Crazy strong.