By Josh Finn
Just days after returning from a grueling run across the Sahara Desert helping to raise awareness about the lack of clean drinking water in Africa, Ray Zahab is already thinking about his next adventure.
The 38-year-old ultramarathon runner from Chelsea wants to run across Newfoundland, his wife’s home province. He’s hoping to cover almost 900 kilometres in just eight or nine days.
That may seem extraordinary to most people but for Zahab it’s a walk in the park. He just finished a 111-day, 7,500-kilometre trek through the Sahara Desert, enduring extreme heat, sandstorms and sickness.
Zahab says he came up with the idea to run across the Sahara after he ran 333 kilometres non-stop through Niger in 2004.
“It was just a beautiful place and I wanted to go [back],” he says.
On an average day in Africa, Zahab and his expedition partners, Charlie Engle and Kevin Lin would wake up at 4 a.m. and run from 5 a.m. until noon. After a short break, the trio would continue running until sometime in the evening “depending on the sandstorms,” says Zahab.
Throughout the expedition Zahab endured dysentery and ran the final 1,500 kilometres with tendonitis. Despite these challenges, Zahab did not rest for even one day. He says he woke up each morning and “went on auto-pilot.”
He admits it was hard.
“When you’re injured, it’s really, really tough. You have to get your head around the fact that you have to keep going. You don’t have much of a choice,” he says.
Zahab says the major motivating factor to keep running was the thought of returning to Canada to see his wife and friends.
Zahab’s wife, Kathy Adams, says she spoke to her husband about once a week by satellite phone.
She travelled to Niger at Christmas and was with the expedition for the final leg of the journey through Egypt.
While Adams says she was concerned about her husband’s health along with way, she says she never doubted his ability to finish.
“Ray is very mentally strong which I think is what you need to be to take on an expedition like that . . . there was never any doubt in my mind he would finish it,” she says.
As the first people to run across the entire Sahara Desert, Zahab and his teammates saw incredible scenery. Zahab called the Ténéré desert region of Niger one of the most beautiful places he has seen on Earth.
But along with the beauty of the desert, Zahab says he also witnessed firsthand the lack of clean water on the continent.
“In Mali, we went into this small, little village. There was this big open pit with camels pooping in the water and people were getting their water from there. It was really sad to see that,” says Zahab.
Zahab’s expedition will be made into a documentary, Running the Sahara, to be narrated by actor Matt Damon.
The film is expected to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in September.
The documentary will be used to help promote the H2O Africa Foundation. The organization hopes to use the expedition and film to create awareness of the water crisis and support clean water programs, especially in areas along the expedition route.
The foundation links to other charitable organizations including the ONE Campaign, a high-profile U.S. advocacy group devoted to fighting global poverty.
Meagan McManus, a campaign spokesperson, says it works to raise awareness.
McManus says the work of H2O Africa is vital to ONE’s ultimate goal of ending world poverty.
“Water is incredibly vital. It is life and death to so many of these people,” she says.
According to the World Health Organization, lack of safe drinking water kills almost 4,500 children every day.
Zahab says Canadians often take water for granted. His experience in Africa inspired him to change his own water consumption patterns.
“We let the taps run until the water is the right temperature, it’s crazy,” says Zahab. “[In Africa], they don’t have taps, they don’t have anything, so it really brings it home . . . in this day and age, people are still starving, basically, for water.”
Zahab says he hopes to continue working with H2O Africa but has no plans for another major expedition.
“I think he wants to focus on the shorter, 250-kilometre kind of races, you know,” laughs Adams.