Marathon runners have Chris Parry to thank for saving their special memories. What they don’t know is that the Englishman is running a ‘long haul race’ of his own, as Natasha Rego discovers

 
A marathon is one of the greatest tests of endurance; every year, across the globe, hundreds of thousands of people are caught on camera during these events. Who wouldn’t want to save their moment of glory—remember, it’s more about participating than about winning—for posterity?

The world’s largest photographic site, Marathon Photos, has shot at over 6,500 of such mass participation sporting events in some 66 countries since 1998, and has more images online than photo agencies Getty and Corbis put together. Their secret: they hire local professional photographers to capture images and video clips of participants at these events.

Lucky for us, they’re front and centre at the biggest runs in the country, thanks to Chris Parry, a managing partner at Marathon Photos, who made this possible when he struck a deal with Procam International, the promoters of mega running events in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru and Kolkata, about 12 years ago.

Over a leisurely seafood lunch in Mumbai, the 71 year-old explains to us how the portal works: “All those hundreds of thousands of photographs and videos are married to the bib numbers of individual runners that appear on each frame with the help of identification software. and uploaded onto the company’s portal, just hours after the race is completed.” As for those images where the number is partially hidden, Parry says, “For that we have a search engine where you can key in what you were wearing on that day, say a green shirt and black shorts, and it will find the relevant images for the runner to add to their photo album.”

Headquartered in New Zealand with a network of photographers the world over, Marathon Photos maintains a permanent online archive (www.marathon-photos.com) of over 159 million photographs of some 28 million athletes from mass participation sporting events across the world. And those numbers are steadily growing.

Driving the point home, Parry says, “At the Mumbai Marathon this January, we had about 20 photographers who shot over 150,000 photographs of about 24,000 runners in the full and half marathons. But, for instance, at Ride London, one of the world’s largest cycling events, we take nearly half-a-million photographs of participants as there are so many different locations and the race is so long.”

Parry, a photographer and former adman, is in charge of gaining contracts in different markets. Naturally, his job keeps him on the move for almost half the year. He refers to an app on his phone when we ask him where he is off to next. “From here, I go to Washington DC to meet with race organisers, then to Austin, Texas, for the Running USA conference. I fly home to the UK for a couple of weeks before I take off to Abu Dhabi for a triathlon.” The app helps him keep track of his schedule—as his friend and colleague Dilip Jayaram, CEO of Procam International, tells us, he sometimes forgets which country he needs to be in next! We look at the app to take stock of the places he has visited in the last 12 months: 37 cities in five continents.

Home, though, is the town of Marlow in Buckinghamshire, near Windsor—“near the queen!”—and this is where Parry’s tryst with photography began. After a flourishing career in advertising and long, successful stints with top brands, he decided to quit the corporate world. “I had spent 30 years in advertising and had had enough of its cut-throat, bureaucratic nature,” he says. So he turned to his wife of five years at that time and said, “Karen, what shall I do?” She said, “Follow your passion!”

Parry’s passion, as you may have guessed, was photography, a hobby he had picked up from his amateur photographer father. He set up a website and held a small exhibition in Marlow of some landscapes he had made over the years. Celebrating at the local pub after a successful show, Parry turned to Karen and asked her again, “Well, what do I do now?” And she said, “Carry on!”

At the exhibition, a man named Chris Sumner, director of a store for running equipment in the UK, liked Parry’s photographs and asked if he could use them on his website. It turned out that Sumner was also the race director of two major races in the UK, which intrigued Parry. “In my lack of knowledge about such running events, I asked him if he needed a photographer for the race. He said, actually you need a bit more than one photographer!” Because one race had 20,000 and another race had 25,000 participants.

Sumner introduced Parry to some companies that shot sporting events; Marathon Photos was one of them. And they didn’t just want Parry to shoot for them; they wanted him to be a partner. He joined them on the condition that he could also start and run his dream photographic tour company on the side. “Francis Kay, the founder of Marathon Photos, agreed, but he also thought I would be too busy to do both,” recalls Parry. Indeed, he did get busy bringing in the contracts. When he started, there were only about three events in the UK that Marathon Photos was shooting and barely a handful in Europe. “But within a few months, we got loads of events. I’m a salesman, you see. I even brought India to the company.”

Not bad for a guy who failed all his high school exams except the one in religious knowledge! “The headmaster sat my parents down and said to them, ‘I’m sorry Mr & Mrs Parry, but I have no hope for your son at all. The only thing I can suggest is that he takes up the cloth and become a priest.’”

Five or six years later after high school, he rose from the dispatch department of an advertising agency—where he carried printing blocks of ads to newspapers before they went to print—to become the director of his first advertising agency. “That day, my father went down to see the headmaster and had a few words with him!” he chuckles.

Parry’s career path followed an enviable trajectory. “I became accounts director, then board director, then managing director, then I set up my own company, sold that, then set up another company and sold that, then joined a top advertising and marketing agency in London,” he rattles off. In fact, he has created, bought, sold, merged, developed and run several successful, multinational marketing agencies.

Though it took him 12 more years, Parry did eventually get to start his dream company, Plus One Photo Tours, which, for customers, combines the joy of travelling to exotic locations and getting a lesson in photography while you’re at it.

It all came together just before his 70th birthday, which he was celebrating at a villa in Spain. As he lay in the pool on an inflatable swan, he turned to Karen and said, “Karen, we are going to set up the photo tours company.” As he started brainstorming on how to go about it, Karen, a marketing and communications professional herself, started scribbling notes under the shade of an umbrella by the pool. At one point, she looked up and went, “Where do you find all the energy?”

“I have no idea, to be honest,” he tells us. “People say to me, why don’t you retire? What would I do? I don’t want to play golf, I don’t want to sit around with a bunch of old geezers…. I think of old people as ‘old’ because they are old in their ways of life. On the other hand, my children [four in all] go, dad, you should grow up!”

Sure, but starting a company at the age of 70? Parry confesses, “I wanted to create something so that if and when I die, though I don’t intend to, I would leave behind something for Karen to continue.”

Parry knows a thing or two about staring death in the face. Three years ago, he was diagnosed with cancer and had to undergo a nine-hour surgery. “I got cancer of the oesophagus—where all the food goes, and the drink, and anything else you put down there. The tumour was also in my stomach, so they had to remove half my stomach. And of that half stomach, my surgeon Nick [Maynard] then created a new oesophagus. Just amazing! So now I have a very small stomach and no way of knowing when I am hungry.” (They had to also remove the part of the stomach that produces the ‘hunger hormone’ that lets a person know they are hungry.)

There was another consequence of his surgery and chemotherapy: Parry now only shoots in warm countries. When it gets cold, he loses sensation in his fingers and he has no sensation in his toes. He also has to calculate when to begin and end a meal, because he can’t eat as much as he used to. “But I can drink as much, though I get very drunk very quickly, because I don’t have the mass for it anymore,” he affirms, having lost a dramatic 40 kg since his operation. He weighs only about 80 kg now.

But nothing, it seems, can hold Parry down. Three months after his operation, he was having lunch in Mumbai with Karen, sitting right across from the table we are at now, and starting to adjust to life after cancer. “Life is completely different now,” he says. “Every day is a special day and everybody should think that because you don’t know if today will be your last.”

Parry will be back in India this May, just in time to rally his photographers for the TCS World 10K in Bengaluru. Peak summer will be receding and the monsoon will be looming. But the air will be warm—just the way he likes it.

Photo: Tony Wallbank / Marathon Photos
Featured in Harmony — Celebrate Age Magazine
May 2018