Hazy Snapshots of the 2024 Hellenic Mountain Race

One day, some years ago, while visiting my parents in Scotland, I asked my mother if I could take her portrait on an old compact film camera I’d picked up. I showed her the camera and told her it reminded me of the old Olympus mju we had growing up. To which she replied, “The Olympus?! It’s still up in the Attic, gathering dust. Do you want it?”

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Since then, I’ve been using our original family camera to document my life and bike trips. The camera that caught some of my very first steps in life and all of our early family holidays.

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From a young age, I knew I was part of a family of budding amateur photographers. Snap happy and with a bookshelf full of family photo albums, I’d spend a bunch of my free time running my fingers through the old pages and moments trapped in time. In many ways, I miss this way of capturing those memories, especially in today’s age of every moment being documented, saved, and stored in hyper-definition and full technicolor. We now live in a “picture or it didn’t happen” culture. 

In a grand adventure such as the Hellenic Mountain Race, even in hyper-definition, you will never be able to fully encapsulate what it was like to be there and how you felt going through it. The best you can aim for is a beautiful and insightful glimpse of it.

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In ultra racing, most people fall into two main camps when it comes to documenting their adventure: those who will stop, even on descents, to pose the perfect shot of all the highlights of the route and others who get to the finish line with a handful of blurry images of food they ate and mechanical issues they had and just hope that the media team might have gotten something good of them.

This is where my role in the media team steps in nicely. As the podcast host and independent analogue stills photographer, I have an opportunity to tell a story, humanise what seems superhuman, and shed some light on the experience in an intimate way. 

The podcast feels vivid and raw—a true insight into how it feels to go through the experience—but removing the visual leaves so much room for the listener to fill in the gaps with their imagination. Much like reading a book instead of watching the movie, with the right combination of conversations and transitions, you can take the listener on the journey with you and allow them the imaginative freedom to fill in the gaps with other visuals they have access to.

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It was only the second time I had taken on the role of podcast host, after making the Atlas Mountain Race podcast series back in February, and this time around, I felt I had established my style as an interviewer. It helps that I am naturally curious and enjoy a good story, so I take a genuine interest in the characters and their experience. In this series, my editor, Mel Webb, also helped raise the bar in a big way in terms of audio quality, music, and transitions. One volunteer even told me my intros and outros sounded like they had been prerecorded in a studio instead of huddled under bed sheets in the corner of random hotel rooms at 1 a.m.

My black-and-white film images provide a more detailed yet still incomplete visual of a place and its people. They leave plenty to the imagination while bringing in a timeless aesthetic, setting a scene, and creating a mood rather than providing a complete context. This, for me at least, feels more true to the experience. 

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Chatting to racers about their last few days on the course, it’s clear that so much of it is a blur. The memories are already incomplete and overlapping, and they are heavily influenced by the time of day, the weather conditions, and whatever level of hunger they were feeling at the time. In the Hellenic Mountain Race, with so much relentless climbing from beginning to end, I would hear a racer every day tell me, “It was on the big pass, after the small village, before the hike-a-bike!” If I had a podcast bingo card, this phrase, or some variation, would be on it.

When you move through so many dramatic landscapes every day, when each day feels like two or three, a neat and chronological timeline of views, villages, and mountain passes is barely possible. What you’re left with is a hazy and somewhat inaccurate series of moments, both beautiful and tough, with a wealth of space in between that you will never truly capture. The memory after the fact is also already not entirely the same as it was in the moment, but the raw and unfiltered nature of voice recordings keeps things in context.

As a racer, your experience becomes a jumbled collection of moments with gaps in between, and it feels very similar for the media team. By the time I reached the finish line, my eyes scanned the room at the finishers’ party, and I could pick out almost all 70+ racers by name (and many by cap number) and tell you a short story of a part of their race or backstory. While I had missed 95% of their time on the course, the time I spent with them shone a light and left an impression. 

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In this way, my snippets of voices and sounds mixed with black-and-white pictures provide beauty and insight. They are inherently snapshots that are imperfect and incomplete, much like the memories of the experience itself. 

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You can find all nine of Allan’s podacst episodes from the 2024 Hellenic Mountain Race on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. And in races like the Hellenic Mountain Race, do you think media coverage of the event is essential, or do you think racers should be left completely on their own in self-supported events? Let us know in the conversation below.

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