The first ultra-marathon Ray Zahab ever entered was the Yukon Arctic Ultra. Not a gentle introduction — a footrace across frozen ground where the cold can split open your lungs if you breathe wrong. He won it. Not because he’d trained for years, but because somewhere between the starting line and the finish, he stopped believing the story he’d been telling himself about who he was.
That story had been simple: two packs of cigarettes a day, parties, late nights, a body he treated like it didn’t matter. Ray was approaching thirty when his brother — an ice climber, relentlessly outdoors — suggested he try something different. Not running. Ice climbing. Up a frozen waterfall in Ontario. Ray went. He doesn’t say it changed him immediately, but something shifted. Within a few years, he was racing mountain bikes internationally. By 2004, he’d picked up ultra running. By the early 2000s, the smoker was gone. In his place: someone who could run 111 days across the Sahara Desert.
How does that happen? Not the running itself — the mechanics are simple enough: one foot, then the other, repeat for 7,500 kilometres. The question is how you become the person who wants to.
The turn in the desert.
After the Yukon Arctic Ultra, Ray started thinking bigger. Not faster races, longer ones. Not more competitive, more remote. In 2006, he and two others set out to cross the Sahara Desert on foot — coast to coast, Atlantic to Red Sea, through six countries. No resupply drops in the middle. No vehicles shadowing them the whole way. Just three runners, a support crew, and 111 days of sand, heat, and distance that rewrites what a human body thinks it can survive.
The expedition wasn’t just about the running. Ray saw it as a platform. Students around the world could track the team in real time via a live website — videos, photos, satellite updates from places most of them would never see. The Sahara became a classroom. The expedition raised awareness and funding for water projects in North Africa. But it also did something to Ray. It clarified a question he’d been circling: what do you do with an experience like that once it’s over?
I went from having pretty much zero passion in my life, treating my body as horribly as one possibly could. And then, a 180-degree shift over a few years… By the early two thousands, I’m racing mountain bikes all over the world, I’m adventure racing, and then I pick up ultra running in 2004 and I win my first ultra marathon.
— Ray Zahab
The answer became Impossible2Possible — a charity that takes young people, aged sixteen to twenty-one, on expeditions around the world at no cost. Not soft adventures. Real ones. Youth ambassadors running from one dinosaur dig site to another in the desert, learning palaeontology in the field. Expeditions to the Arctic, the Atacama, Baffin Island. The kind of trips that don’t just teach resilience — they require it.
What it takes to keep moving.
A typical day on one of Ray’s expeditions starts early. Wake before light. Breakfast. Pack camp. Then you move all day, stopping only for lunch — unless you’re in extreme cold, in which case you don’t stop, because stopping in the Arctic can mean hypothermia sets in faster than you can get the stove lit. In the desert, the gear is different but the stakes are the same: dehydration, heat exhaustion, the way your mind starts to fracture when the horizon never changes.
Team dynamics matter more than fitness. You can be the strongest runner in the group and still be the weak link if you can’t handle conflict, boredom, or the small betrayals that happen when everyone’s too tired to be kind. Ray talks about this carefully — he focuses on the positive, on what works, on the places he’s been lucky enough to see. But between the lines, you hear it: expeditions break people. Not always physically. Sometimes it’s just the realisation that you’re not who you thought you were when the conditions get hard.
Ray’s also battled cancer. He doesn’t dwell on it in the conversation, but it’s there — another test, another redefinition of limits. The body that ran the Sahara also had to survive something it couldn’t outrun. He came through it. Kept moving. Kept building Impossible2Possible. Kept taking clients through his guiding company, KapiK1, to Baffin Island and the Atacama Desert — the two places, he says, that fascinate people most.
Baffin Island makes sense. It’s raw, cold, unforgiving in a way that clarifies things. The Atacama is the opposite extreme: the driest desert on Earth, a place where nothing should survive but somehow does. Both places strip away distraction. Both demand presence. Both teach you something about who you are when no one’s watching.
In this conversation.
We go into the mechanics of Ray’s transformation — not just the decision to quit smoking, but the years of incremental change that followed. We hear about the Yukon Arctic Ultra and the moment he realised he could feel invincible and destroyed at the same time. Ray walks through what it’s like to set up camp in the Arctic, where survival depends on getting it right, versus the desert, where the heat rewrites the rules entirely. He talks about the educational mission behind Impossible2Possible, the live expeditions that connect students to remote corners of the world, and what happens when you give young people the chance to test themselves in environments that don’t care how old they are.
Call to adventure.
If you want to see what Ray means when he talks about places that change people, go to Baffin Island or the Atacama Desert. Not on your own — not unless you know what you’re doing — but with someone who’s been there, who knows the terrain, who can show you what’s possible when you stop thinking about comfort and start thinking about presence. KapiK1, Ray’s guiding company, runs trips to both. The point isn’t to suffer. It’s to see what you’re capable of when the conditions demand it.
Pay it forward.
Find an outdoor advocacy group in your community that gives young people the chance to learn outside. Not a weekend camp. Something real. Something that asks them to navigate, problem-solve, rely on each other when things go wrong. Ray believes giving young people the opportunity to have experiences in the outdoors is critically important — not as a luxury, but as a foundation. Support the groups doing that work. Fund them if you can. Volunteer if you can’t.
About Ray.
Ray Zahab is an ultra-endurance athlete, filmmaker, and founder of Impossible2Possible, a charity that takes young people on educational expeditions around the world. He has run across the Sahara Desert, trekked to the South Pole, and set world records in some of the most extreme environments on Earth. He survived cancer. He runs KapiK1, a guiding company that takes clients to Baffin Island and the Atacama Desert. He used to smoke two packs a day.
At the end of the Yukon Arctic Ultra, Ray asked himself a question: how could he feel so invincible at the finish line when he’d been in so much pain at the start? The answer wasn’t about the race. It was about what happens when you stop believing the limits you’ve inherited and start testing the ones that might actually be real. Sometimes the first step is away from the cigarettes. Sometimes it’s towards a frozen waterfall. Either way, you have to take it.
