Running Tunisia Day 2

Hey everyone! Some updates from the team

Day 1

From Ray:

Today was our first full day running in the Sahara. After a long drive of about 2.5 hours, we began running in the hopes of reaching our goal of 42.2 km by the end of the day – a distance that neither Jill, Kajsa, nor Connor had ever ran in a single day before. The first 20 km was… muddy. The unbelievable lightning/rain storm the previous night had altered the land to such a degree that Jill was skating across the desert. We continued to move forward in the search of lunch – something that the youth ambassadors had been fixated on from km 15 – 20. When we finally crested the hill, we looked down upon the land cruisers and an outstretched blanket covered with sandwiches, oranges, dates, tea… and Mohammed. After our lunch break, we began on the second part of our day; however, during the hottest, most uncomfortable part of the day, we almost immediately experienced problems. Jill was experiencing dehydration as well as nutrition issues. She created a masterpiece on the side of the trail consisting of everything consumed in the past 12 hours as well as sound effects we had never heard before. We made a collective decision to take an easier pace, as it was stiflingly hot at about 33 degrees Celsius. Things were looking up, but at about 33 km, Jill decided to not only hit the wall, but take it out and allow it to fall on top of her. The day finished with a positive attitude, as we were treated to authentic Arabic music complete with sing-a-long in the land cruiser as we jostled down the road back to camp. Jill’s experience today with dehydration really helped us to appreciate the importance of drinking enough water, which has implications not only for completing the trek but makes us realize that people who do not have access to clean drinking water are at a severe disadvantage.






House from Star Wars


Sunset

Also check out this video from the team and this feature on CNN

Day 2

From the Youth Ambassadors:

The day started out with a 1.5 hour drive with rockin’ Arabic/French music in Nardeen’s car to start where we finished yesterday. After a tough day yesterday, we made a collective decision to run 20 minutes, then do a fast walk for 2 minutes. Our goal was to make it back to camp, about 36 km, and everyone was feeling pretty good around lunch time, however, the heat of the day was beginning and we still had about 16 km to go. After lunch, we came across a herd of dromedaries (one-humped camels) and watched as Andy chased them around the desert in his attempt to ride one! As the heat pressed down on us, we tried to focus on hydrating properly and keeping a consistent pace while out on our own. Throughout the first two days, Kathy (Ray’s wife) had been running alongside with us and helping with pacing, but today, she deemed us ready to go out on our own and make our own decisions on proper speed for running a multi-day expedition. The heat was very hard to take the last 10 km, but we worked together to keep everyone motivated and could not have been happier when we crested the hill to overlook the camp in front of us. Back at camp, we had an interesting educational discussion with Doc Affleck about a variety of water issues as well as facts and interesting history about the theories of the origins of water. Ray had us do an experiment where we carried 12 litres of water around camp to get a feel for what it is like for children to carry water for miles on end that is necessary for their everyday life.

Volcanic Interference

Hi Everyone! My name is Kat and I'm one of i2P's advisors. While Ray and the i2P team are in Tunisia, I'm going to guest blog to keep you updated on all of their incredible adventures- before they left they had to navigate being challenged by a volcano!

In Bob and Ray's words:

"As it goes with any expedition you need to have proper planning, a good logistics team behind you, and of course a lot of luck! Today's Volcano in Iceland has put us into an early adaptation mode since the last update we received was that our flights from Montreal to Paris had been canceled! Fortunately the impossible2Possible team has McCord Travel, an amazing travel agency supporting us and first thing this morning they were hard at work trying to reserve us a flight into Tunisia through an alternative route. At this point we have flights reserved and as I write this they are trying to transfer the new tickets. Our new route has us heading through Morocco and only landing 2 hours behind our original travel itinerary!

The team has spent the morning in orientation and we are all getting to know each other! It was great to finally meet the youth ambassadors in person! We couldn't have selected a better group of four for this journey!

We will keep you posted of any other travel changes!"

You can meet the incredible Youth Ambassadors yourself by checking out this video:

Youth Ambassador Intros from GOi2P on Vimeo.

Running Tunisia and stuff

Hey There !

Its been awhile (as usual) .....seems life gets so busy i rarely can write. ANyhow, SIberia went awesome....check it out at www.siberianx.com for the deets. We were able to communicate with the students during the expedition, but what really blew me away was they way so many young people came together to fundraise and so far raise in the $ 12 000 range for water projects in Africa- for people they may never meet. The power of youth amazes me. So much hope, so much potential.

This week we leave for Tunisia. Four amazing Youth Ambassadors will run across the northern Sahara. I am proud to be part of their team. www.runningtunisia.com Please stay tuned....

2010 Siberian Express For Water !

Impossible2Possible H20 Initiative !

I hope everyone had awesome holidays !!! Roughly 60 days from now Kevin Vallely and I will be running 60-70 kms per day across Lake Baikal….unsupported ! We will drag everything we need for the entire expedition in specially made sleds- that includes nearly 100 pounds of food, sleeping gear, camera equipment Iridium and our BGAN. Important equipment to have- as our goal is not to cross the world’s largest (by volume) fresh water lake a small team- We actually will be a team of thousands as students from Europe, US and Canada join us tracking our daily progress, communicate with us as we stream live video into classrooms, and speak with us via our Iridiums! We will also post daily blogs and film high definition footage and photos that will be made available to students for their own projects.

Training has been going well- i am convincing myself I love the cold…it seemed to work last year on the way to the South Pole ! The website for Siberian Express launches January 11. You will be able to access it from www.impossible2possible.com at that time…

Education, Inspiration,…Action !

As we travel to the Arctic to train and prepare (Yellowknife on January 11-13 and Pangnirtung Jan 29-30), students will share in the prep for the Siberia Expedition (which takes place March 1-11). The Experiential Learning program will commence at the same time- our team lead by Dr. Ewan Affleck has been busy preparing the best Educational Modules we have made to date- and will encompass the topic of this expedition…water ! Students and schools will also combine forces to raise the resources needed for a well project and rainwater collection project in Africa based on everything they learn about this precious of all resources! Our partners for these projects will be the Ryans Well Foundation and Giving Water.Org. Great organizations with great people.

Part 2

Siberian Express for Water is the first of two expeditions in our 2010 H20 initiative. The second is our next Youth Expedition. Running Tunisia will take place this April as 5 Youth Ambassadors attempt an epic run across Tunisia…in their own version of Running The Sahara ! More details on this later- I hope you will join us for these two expeditions ! We are still accepting applications for Youth Ambassadors- details are on the impossible2Possible.com website ! Schools are still able to sign up as well to communicate with us, learn about water…and make a difference ! Everything is free of charge. Thank you all once again for reading along and for your emails. Next newsletter soon ! Keep running !!!