When I first heard about "Running the Sahara", I thought - it's impossible.
When I saw their website, I thought - itss hardly possible for a simple man.
When I saw the movie "Running the Sahara", I thought - when you really believe in yourself, everything is possible, no matter how old are you, no matter what is your previous experience.
Three men decided to run through all Sahara desert in 2006. Those 3 men are Charlie Engle, Ray Zahab and Kevin Lin. It is worth to write a different article about each of them and I promise, I will do it.
They started their huge challenge in Senegal and finished in Egypt touching the Red sea. They had traveled 4300 miles (6920km). They ran for 111 days and what is realy REALY impressive - they were running all days. Non stop. Isn't that amazing? On average they made 39 miles (62,3 km) everyday - more than one marathon everyday! On the last days they ran more than 2 marathons everyday, the record of one day was nearly 100k!
Everyday they were running from 5 a.m. in the morning till noon and after resting few hours they were running until darkness. The temperature was really high in day time, remember, it's the Sahara desert, it's even hard to walk there. Sometimes they even had to run during the sandstorm. Most of miles were run on the sand. No forests, no meadows, just sand sand and more sand.
After doing this huge run they released the movie "Running the Sahara". A narrator in this movie is Matt Damon - a real Hollywood star! This movie is really worth watching. You can see how they run, what obstacles they had to overcome and how they felt. There's one really amazing place where they reach a little village in the middle of the desert. Children became really happy when saw them and were running with them. There were lots of children and other desert people. There were honestly happy. It was incredible feeling just watching that, I can't imagine how those three men felt at that moment.
Here you can see "Running the sahara" trailer:
Matt Damon and these runners released a project called "H2O Africa" which helps to raise money and help people in desert who do not have access to fresh water. There are really extremely many people who don't have fresh water everyday. It's really hard to believe that some people don't have water to wash their face everyday, they don't have water to wash their clothes, they don't even have water to drink as much as they want. Some of them have to walk 4 or 8 hours everyday to get some water. It's a big problem and this project helps to solve that problem. I really hope that project will become big and many people will be saved.
You can visit their website to look for more information about this incredible project.