Ray Zahab and Kevin Vallely Announce "What's Next"!

While I was away last week, ultra-runners Ray Zahab and Kevin Vallely announce their plans for their next adventure as well. The two men have quite a history of traveling for long distances across remote and demanding environments, and their next expedition will be no exception in that department either. Last week, Ray announced on Facebook that the pair would be crossing the Atacama Desert in Chile on foot saying: “I have been promising for weeks to fill you in on whats next…what is the January i2P Expedition…well, here it is ! Over 1100 kms of running, roughly 80 kms per day, sporadic resupply.”

The quote was accompanied by a brief video that had Ray explaining a bit about the run, which will throw him and Kevin into one of the driest places on the planet. He notes that they’ll only have the potential to get water about once per day, so it’ll be a challenging expedition from that stand point alone. They’ll also average approximately 80km (50 miles) per day, which sounds amazingly brutal.

Of course, they’ll be undertaking this expedition under the umbrella of the impossible2Possible organization, which means they’ll also be reaching out to hundreds of classrooms and thousands of students along the way as well. They’ll also be focused on the theme of biodiversity, which is at the center of all of i2P’s activities this year.

Ray and Kevin are certainly no strangers to these kinds of long distance tests of endurance. Earlier this year, as you may recall, they ran the length of Lake Baikal in Siberia during the winter. On that journey they managed to average more than 50km per day, covering the entire 640+ kilometers in just 13 days. The Atacama Desert will be a completely different challenge, but considering that Ray has already run across the Sahara, I think he knows what he’s getting himself into.

I’ll obviously post more on this as the expedition takes places.

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Kraig Becker

Kraig is an outdoor and adventure travel writer based in Nashville, TN. Over the course of his career, he has contributed to numerous online and print outlets, including Popular Mechanics, Gear Junkie, Outside Online, National Geographic, Digital Trends, Business Insider, TripSavvy, about.com, and of course The Adventure Blog.