I moved back to Wales this summer, something my wife and I have been wanting to do for years. It was such a great feeling being back home and being close to the mountains again that I went through a stint of watching lots of ultramarathon races through the welsh hills. One that particularly stuck out to me was a film called 47 Copa which followed Huw Jack Brassington on a mammoth endeavor of climbing 47 of Wale’s highest mountains in just 24 hours - The Paddy Buckley round. So I decided to map it!

 Continuing my fascination with ultramarathons around Wales I then watched an excellent documentary on the Dragons Back Race which documents 84 competitors running 315km over 5 days ascending roughly 14,600m in total! I mapped this and created a little animated fly-through…

 A few years ago, at Ito World, we also mapped one of the stages of the Tour de France, highlighting the relay planes which were following the peloton.

I wanted to do a little bit of an update on this animation but just using the aesthetic I had designed for the previous ultramarathon races. The resulting flythrough video looked great, admittedly adding in those relay planes of even the pelaton cycling through the hills would have been cool…

I want to get back to mapping races, the kind folk of Twitter offered some excellent examples of races that would be cool to visualise including Reds Bulls X-Alps which I am part way through designing. Watch this space for more!