Expreso De Los Andes Expedition: Introduction

It all starts this Saturday, Feb 18, the long hours of training behind us - in the bank we hope - and our 1,700-kilometre run ahead. It's an intimidating prospect to be honest, the idea of running non-stop across South America averaging 70 to 100 kilometre a day but the fact that we won't be alone in our challenge is bolstering our resolve. We're going to have thousands of students from around the world joining us.

It seems like only yesterday that Canadian ultra-runner and founder of impossible2Possible (i2P), Ray Zahab and I teamed up to make an unsupported trek to the South Pole. It was the spring of 2008 and Ray had reached an epiphany through his running adventuring: he wanted to use his adventures to inspire others.

Anyone who has ever met Ray understands that he's a man who doesn't perceive boundaries and limitations like others do.

The concept of running 7,500 kilometers clear across the Sahara Desert in a non-stop four-month push would seem preposterous in a normal perspective but for Zahab in February 2007, standing in the Red Sea after 111 days of running nearly two marathons a day, it was simply a reality. After undertaking like that, it's little surprise to see his dream to inspire youth to become what it has.

I've been there since the start, watching a newborn idea of i2P grow to take its first wobbly, tottering steps around a coffee table in Seattle, to see it mature and build through four years of adventuring and now to stand grown-up inspiring countless thousands through its actions and those actions are adventure.

It wasn't long after that phone call back in 2008 that Ray, myself and Richard Weber would reach the South Pole and do it in world record time to boot. In 2010, Ray and I would race across frozen Lake Baikal in Siberia breaking another record in the process. We discovered quickly we worked well together.

The Expreso De Los Andes expedition is our third 'extreme' i2P expedition together and it promises to be a doozy. Starting in the Chilean town of Concon on the Pacific coast, Ray and I will start our journey running 70kms per day up and over the Andes mountains to the Argentinian border. This is high country - really high country in fact - and we're uncertain what toll such high altitude will take on us but once we make it through these mountains we won't be backing it off, in fact, we hope to ramp up our running efforts to 100 kilometres per day, every day, for the remaining 1,100 kilometers to our finish. On the last day of the expedition i2P Youth Ambassadors Jessie Lily and Conner Clerke will join us for the final 100 kilometre non-stop stretch to Buenos Aires and the Atlantic Ocean.

As Ray and I make our run across South America we will have thousands of students following us through our interactive website which includes an expedition live tracker, live videoconferencing, daily video blogs, photos and experiments.

The objective of the expedition is to use the running adventure as a means to educate, inspire and empower administrators, teachers and students to take on the i2P Health and Physical Activity Challenge.

There's little doubt the expedition will test our physical limits and this has garnered the interest of Dr. Greg Wells, physiologist and Gemini Award winner for his Superbodies segments during the Vancouver 2010 Olympics coverage.

Dr. Wells will gather data from Ray and I in an attempt to understand how the human body adapts (or degrades) during extreme endurance.

In a few days the expedition begins. The coming weeks promise to be a testing challenge for Ray and I, a test, in our hope, that spurs teachers and students to pursue their own challenges. We hope you can follow along.