Some people are nuts. You’d have to be to come up with an idea like, “Hey, wouldn’t it be great to run across the Sahara desert!”

Run across the world’s largest sand mass, which stretches nearly 5,000 kilometres from east to west across northern Africa?

Are you kidding.
But people are strange that way.
One guy came up with an idea to get into the Guinness World Book of Records by cycling backwards 60.45 kilometres while playing the violin.
The verdict’s still out on whether or not that 5 hours and 9 minutes of his life was well spent.
Another guy decided it would be a good idea to use a manual typewriter to type all the numbers, in word form, from one to one million.
Seven typewriters, 1,000 ink ribbons, 19,890 pages and 16 years and seven months later, he accomplished the bizarre feat.
The list of crazy, why-would-anyone-do-that? feats is endless.
Running isn’t all that spectacular, but running across some of the world’s most inhabitable terrain certainly adds an interesting dimension to it.
Really, who doesn’t like a challenge?
Oh sure, some of us would prefer trying our  luck at Soduko or crossword puzzle, or maybe trying to outwit contestants on Wheel of Fortune or Family Feud.
There’s something rather healthy about a challenge, even if it involves an abnormal amount of risk and personal sacrifice.

This is something runners know and love.
It’s one thing to cross the finish line at the end of marathon.

It’s an entirely different thing to force yourself to put in the months of requisite training to make that moment possible.

But humans are often only limited by the barriers they create for themselves. That’s Canadian Ray Zahab’s take.
Zahab was one of the trio of out-of-the-box thinking guys that was determined to become the first humans to run across the Sahara.
Their story is detailed in the film Running the Sahara.
Zahab was on hand for a screening of the film at the Princess Cinema in Waterloo recently, in which moviegoers got to pick his brain after the credits rolled. The thing that struck me was the normal-guy aura about him.
Sure, it takes something special to run the equivalent of two marathons a day, for 111 days, to run across the Sahara.
But despite his obvious drive and determination to tackle such incredibly difficult challenges, Zahab, one of those super-positive types, is adamant that anybody could do it.
Maybe not everybody can run across the Sahara, but anyone can tackle challenges that would seem extraordinary impossible. And that’s the gist of his message, that plays out in the form of extreme adventures. One of Zahab’s favourite lines is that 90 per cent of such efforts is mental – and so is the other 10 per cent.

For his latest feat, Zahab set a world record travelling by snowshoe to geographic south pole. He uses these feats to raise money for charities, as well as inspire high school students and others with the message that anything is possible.
And hey, if a former pack-a-day smoker can run across the Sahara, what’s to stop anyone of us from accomplishing something equally incredible, whatever that larger-than-ourselves challenge may be.

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