Liminality

We’ve been on the call for under a minute and Camille McMillan has already told me that he has a list of changes he’d like to make to his event. Pencil in hand, conducting an unseen orchestra, he starts to talk me through them. Ever the artist. Ever trying to find the perfect depiction of his vision. 

It is a week since Further Perseverance – Camille’s brainchild, his artistic canvas, a labour of love, and notionally 450km of bikepacking racing (it’s around here that Camille would interject and explain that it’s not technically a race) through the Pyrenees mountains – has come to the end for another year. He sits behind a large, imposing dining table. At least that’s how I picture it now. Sometimes our memories are somehow truer than whatever the reality was. That dining table is set in a low-ceilinged room in his Ariège home. It’s early evening and the light is beginning to fade outside our retrospective windows. Autumn isn’t yet muscling its way in, but summer is definitely thinking about relinquishing its grip and fading away for another year. 

In theory, I am speaking to Camille because he took on the role of photographically documenting this year’s event. I want to find out what that process was like; the sense of closing the loop between creation and presentation; possibly even curating his own work. We do get on to that, but I’ve learnt that the joy of conversation with Camille is that it mirrors his routes. Each discussion feels exploratory, profound in its own way and the deviations contribute towards a deeper, more meaningful end. We settle in, and all that is missing is an aperitif and pairs of shoes drying next to a refuge stove, the moon rising behind silhouetted ridgelines.   

In the meantime, I open a folder of the digital scans of the photographs that Camille took on his Instax. (He’s still waiting for the scans of his film shots to be returned to him). I can imagine them spread out across the table. Twenty eight images; soft around the edges, scratchy, small. Evocative, liminal and romantic. We’ll return to them shortly.

This game begins before the start

One brief, introductory sentence doesn’t do justice to the scale, ambition and immense physical challenge that Further represents. In 2025, were one physically able to, it would be possible to race an ultra every hour of every day of the year. Grinding out miles across continents as the sun sets and rises again, virtually anywhere in the world. Somehow though, Further (and the Pyreneean, “Perseverance” race in particular) seems to have managed to reject much of the formula of what an ultra should be. It remains an outlier in scope and scale and has a reputation that is perhaps best summed up as very, very hard. As with every year the event has run, fewer than half of Further’s starters made it to the finish line.

Never mind the end for now though. This game begins before the clock has started ticking. Riders face a long hike-a-bike to reach the start line at the Refuge du Rulhe. The refuge is a familiar fixture. The route has evolved and changed over its now seven year history and it hasn’t always featured, but for 2025 Camille chose to return to a route that more closely mirrored earlier editions. It criss-crosses the French, Spanish and Andorran border via historic trails; smugglers' paths, trade routes and escape routes for refugees. There are compulsory sectors which can be linked by riders in whatever way they choose. To make things more challenging, many of those sectors are in the high mountains and passes and are extremely exposed and physically hard to navigate on foot; never mind while dragging or carrying a laden bike. 

Here are a few quotes from Camille in his rider’s manual, to give you a small flavour of the endeavour.

''The approach from the Spanish side is steep and hard, the descent into France is a long boulder field. It is more than scree and you will not be happy with me.''

''This is the one that has given me some sleepless nights. We have some real dangers here. It is high, exposed and there is the real danger of falling to your death.''

''I have a few times, met the Douane on the path. Big guys with big guns, they are looking for the smugglers that work this route some nights.''

Whatever happened to mountain craft?

Back to Camille and his dancing pencil and he vocalises an inner monologue that has clearly been playing out in his mind for far longer than this edition of the race.

“Some people still don’t quite get it”, laments Camille. They expect to be able to ride more. They aren’t fully prepared for the mountains or the conditions that they could face. They overestimate themselves or underestimate how different this event is to other races. Not everyone likes being reminded of their own fragility.”

To me it is the beauty of what our man in the Pyrenees has created. He expanded on Further’s ethos significantly the first time we spoke. It is something that dances along the edge of what is safe and possible to be run as an event. Something that goes beyond mindless lifting up your legs and putting them back down again. Because ultimately, to find out what people are really capable of, you have to discover what they cannot do and work back from there. As Camille puts it, “the best and worst happens in the mountains”. 

From an event organiser’s perspective Camille takes his duty of care immensely seriously. There is a very real difference between creating and shaping a challenging arena with a level of risk that can be mitigated against and managed through application of mountain experience and one in which participants face danger which they are unable to read or deal with. He has no interest in leading lambs to the slaughter, but neither does he want a neutered, sterile imitation of adventure.

“Part of me would love to completely ditch GPS tracking. Dotwatching has become a weird side sport and I think it has changed the landscape of bikepacking and bikepacking racing in particular. Why the fuck do you need caps and numbers? I want my participants to feel utterly immersed in what they are doing, not thinking about who’s watching their dot. It’s not about marketing. I’m not interested in growth. I’m interested in the experience. 

I’d love to do an event that was just paper maps, coordinates and maybe some instructions. Like raves in the nineties. You just go to such and such a garage on the M25 and follow your nose from there.”

Immersion

That desire to create something self-contained is part of the reason that Camille chose to document the race himself this year. I was about to describe his approach as trying to reduce the number of touch points that riders had with the outside world while they were out in the mountains. Actually, it is the absolute opposite of that. His reasoning and approach is about making sure that the only touch points that riders have is with the true outside world. The one that he’s brought them there to experience; from a jumble of boulders that resemble giant, scattered scrabble tiles across an entire mountain side; to the glow of the boulangerie window illuminating the street of a village only just beginning to awaken. 

And beyond that, as Camille puts it, “when you do something extreme it enables other things”.

It is true of all ultra races that the one luxury it gives everyone who takes part is time to think. They are an opportunity to explore not just the more remote parts of a landscape, but also the parts of our mind that aren’t given the room to think as we deal with the day-to-day. The overspill. The parts that haven’t been neatly categorised yet. The minutiae of our existence and the big decisions. The philosophical and the very practical. Life in the future and life in the very-much-here-and-now.

“Life and death and, oh – I’ve finished my last Jelly Tot.” – Camille. 

By limiting media coverage and people out on the course, it changes the rider’s perspective; they are not part of the wider show. There is no one keeping an eye on them. It is what it is and what they want it to be. 

Physicality

A few days after she finished, Philippa Battye – this year’s only female completist and 10th overall, shared a photo of the back of her calves. They were scratched and scabby, torn and bruised. Racing is not pretty. It is physical and painful and ugly at times. A thousand times the back of pedals caught the back of her legs as she pushed her bike up (and down) mountain passes. Over and over again. A few seconds of searing pain each time. Every one: a little surprise. Every one a little reminder from her body that you have to really want this to achieve it. 

I quite like looking through the “bikes of XYZ” kind of articles that precede some bikepacking races. It’s always interesting to see the endlessly different ways people choose to carry their essentials with them on the bike, as well as what they deem to be essential). It’s not real though. Everything is packed away neatly into its own space. Everything is clean and functional. I want a “bikes of” at the end of the race. I want to see the scuff marks and the improvised straps and the bodged repairs and the bursting seams. I want the sticky fingerprints on zip pullers, the dried snot on the stem and the mud and cow shit sprayed up the back of the bike. I want the gritty reality, not the optimistic, shiny hopes. Because once again, racing is not pretty. 

“Yeah the Instax is, well it’s a bit crap isn’t”, says Camille. And objectively it is. The cheapest phone camera is more capable in every technical detail. It is easy to over-romanticise old technology. That map and compass has largely been superseded by GPS for a good reason. The same too for vinyl, cassette, CD. This year’s Further winner, Quentin Lille rode (and carried) a carbon mountain bike. Maybe nostalgia isn’t what it used to be. But with relentless technical progress, we sometimes lose something that we don’t realise was important to us until it is gone. Whether that's the warm crackle of a stylus on vinyl or the sense of place that a map gives us compared to a line on a tiny screen. 

It helps, of course, that Camille has been a professional photographer for a very long time now. You might say he has an eye for these things. Many people, more knowledgeable than I am, definitely would. 

Every image evokes a sense of Further. It isn’t glamorous, neither is it glamourising the hardship. Instead – each framed in a white rectangular border – are impressions of moments that somehow manage to carry more detail and storytelling than all the megapixels in existence could. And of course, while I’m looking at the scans hundreds of miles away, Camille can pick up and hold each photograph. Physical memories; present moments already taking their place in history. He can tilt them, touch them, frame them, put them in an album to purposefully open another day.

Imagination 

“There’s room for your imagination in there.” 

I’ll be honest. That’s all I wrote down. Maybe I should record my interviews, but I always feel like it changes the nature of the interactions. It makes them feel like work rather than a curious desire to see the world through someone else’s eyes for an hour or two. I’m pretty sure Camille was being very literal when he said this. It was a reflection on those Instax snaps and the medium’s foibles. It leads on to a larger point though. Documentation doesn’t have to be in the there and then. Storytelling can span longer time periods than even the longest ultra allows for. And perhaps most importantly, in a world where so much of our lives is tracked and recorded and shared and analysed and known about and often instantaneously… perhaps then, there is a space for things to be left to our imaginations. 

It is always the way that as outsiders, we will never get the full picture of what happened on the mountains of the Ariège. There will always be the blurriness at the edges, the hundreds of hours of riding that aren’t photographed or written about at all. There will be room to interpret what happened in the underexposed darkness of a DNF next to a name. 

The difference is, there isn’t the pretence that we have the as-it-happened story. This isn’t neutral journalism with all of the natural biases that comes with it. We return to where we started; Camille closing the loop. It is his way of managing the tension between the commercial needs of any event – entrants, sponsors, marketing – while telling the story he wants it to be told. 

Interestingly, in doing so and by taking a different tack to other races he is building a legacy that extends far beyond the forever spinning newsreel of such and such divide and trans wherever. It may only ever be truly experienced by a select few, but that’s all part of the beauty and ugliness of proper ultra endurance.