The North Face · UTMB
Sufferfest: Welcome to the Pain Cave
The challenge
108 miles. Three countries. 32,000 feet of climbing. Four of the world’s best trail runners find out who they are when the mountain stops caring.
A three-part documentary series following elite trail runners as they prepare for and race UTMB Mont-Blanc in Chamonix — one of the most revered 100-mile races in the world. Where trail coverage has traditionally chased splits, podiums and tracking updates, Sufferfest takes a character-first approach and goes after the mindset: the pressure, the risk, and the grit it takes to reach a start line this big — and what it costs to stay on the course once the weather turns.
Two years after The Crux brought viewers inside World Cup climbing, we set out to do the same for elite trail — a sport with a deep culture and, until now, very little coverage that went past the finish line. The North Face wanted what The Crux had earned them in climbing: standing inside a sport they were investing in, and a reason for its culture to take that investment seriously.
- Client
- The North Face · UTMB
- Scope
- Creative · Production · Post
- Delivered
- 3 episodes30s + 60s teasers, 9:16 and 16:92 scene pulls1 key art package
“As the Director of Brand Storytelling at The North Face, I couldn’t have asked for a better partner than Think Less. They completely wrapped their heads around the complexity and ambition of the production, finding the stories within the chaos and bringing every element together with grit, honesty and incredible sense of narrative. They understood that this wasn’t simply a film about running, it’s a story about the human capacity to endure. The result is a three-part series that captures ultra running in its fullest form: raw, relentless, and deeply human. Sufferfest is a documentary series that doesn’t just document UTMB but gives the viewer a reason to feel it.”
What made it hard
They came from four corners of the world to the same start line.
Four athletes in four countries, one start line, and a course crossing three more — the production had to be as spread out as the story. Covering it meant filming at night, in weather that turned hard enough that organisers neutralised the Pyramides Calcaires — the highest point on the course — for runner safety. That decision, and the storm behind it, are in the series. The harder problem was that nobody knew how it ended. You cannot plan a character arc around a race that has not been run: any of the four could stop at any point, and the film would have to go with someone else. So we tracked all four and stayed ready to lose one, embedded close enough to move the story to whoever the mountain left standing.
- 20Production days
- 3–15Crew, scaled per shoot
- 40Hours of continuous coverage
- Jon Albon — Norway
- Josh Wade — England
- Ruth Croft — New Zealand
- Emily Hawgood — Idaho
- Chamonix — the start line
What we made
- A runner leaping a gap on the open fell.
- A runner picking a line through boulders.
- A camera and monitor rigged on the fell between setups.
- A runner small against a rocky slope, seen from above.
- The crew filming runners on a climb.
- A runner silhouetted against a deep blue dusk sky.
- A runner crossing a broad hillside.
- Three crew working cameras against open sky.
- An operator filming a runner across broken ground.
The teasers ran 30 and 60 seconds in both 9:16 and 16:9, because they had to work on The North Face’s global channels and on the athletes’ own feeds, where the vertical cut is the only one that plays. The episodes did second duty offline — internal and external marketing, and a pop-up screening The North Face ran at UTMB in 2026. The key art package, poster through thumbnails and sharing assets, is what let the rest of it travel without us.
- 3Episodes
- 30s + 60sTeasers, 9:16 and 16:9
- 2Scene pulls
- 1Key art package
How we did it
How do you cover 108 miles of mountain, in three countries, at night?
Two camera units, moving on foot and by ATV, leapfrogging the field between checkpoints. We shot on Super 16, FX6 and Red. The forty hours of continuous coverage ran as shift patterns rather than heroics — someone was awake for every hour of it, getting cards off the mountain and backed up before anyone slept. Alps Films, based in Europe, held the relationship with UTMB’s organisers and kept comms consistent across the race.
- 108Miles
- 31,824Feet climbed
- 3Countries
- 8,415Feet at its highest
The series
Episode01
“If you’re gonna beat me, you’re gonna bleed.”
Episode02
“It’s not necessarily something that’s good for the human body.”
Episode03
“Suffering brings real meaning to life, realizing that it’s fragile but it’s beautiful.”
On the course
Alongside the athletes we filmed the people who make UTMB what it is: local residents, volunteers, race organisers. The race is the spine of the series, but Chamonix is the reason it matters — a global pilgrimage more than a start list.
