by Yvonne Zacharias

About eight years ago, Ray Zahab was a 31-year-old guy with a pack-a-day smoking habit. Sometimes two packs. He had grown up but never outgrown his partying ways. “I was sick of how I felt. I felt physically terrible. I felt mentally terrible. I felt out of control. I felt like, ‘Where the hell is my life going?’ I just didn’t feel that I was going anywhere,” said Zahab, an Ontario farm boy who now lives in Chelsea, Que., in the lush Gatineau region near Ottawa. “I felt sorry for myself in some weird way.”

He was with friends at their favourite watering hole some time in late 1998 when he decided: Enough! He was going to change his life. He was going to quit smoking.

Not right away, though. He was giving himself a year and a bit to get in shape.

So began Zahab’s journey down the comeback trail, a journey that sent him flying past one milestone after another.

The man who was floundering in a fog at the age of 31 will be the featured speaker on the opening night of Vancouver’s inaugural Projecting Change Film Festival.

Talk about change.

It all came about through gritty determination, a younger brother who helped out, a winning personality and serendipity along the way.

So the year passed and along came New Year’s Eve 1999, a time of ushering in the new millennium, a time of big resolutions.

True to his promise to himself, on that night, Zahab smoked his last cigarette.

Enter his younger brother John, who is into cool sports. He took Ray in tow and introduced him to mountain biking. The two built a bond. John got Ray hooked on the sport and got him dabbling in other ones as well.

But the biggest change came in late 2003, when Zahab was flipping through an outdoors magazine and noticed an article on a 160-kilometre race in the Yukon. “I was just blown away by what these people could do physically and mentally.” He knew he had to try it.

He also knew he had no time to waste to train for it. The race was in February of 2004.

As it turned out, one of his buddies was a really good runner. They trained together. Zahab’s body ached with each step.

Still, he ran.

He got into the race. And what a race it was. Plowing through the wilds of the Yukon, pulling a sled. Pushing yourself to the next checkpoint.

Alone.

When he had run 80 kilometres, or to the halfway point, his body was screaming. No more, no more, no more.

With nothing but the impossibly blue sky around him, he sat on his sled and contemplated quitting.

He had a talk with himself. He knew he had to be honest. How can you lie to yourself? He told himself: “I’ll walk as far as I possibly can and when I can’t walk any more and my feet are too sore, I’ll stop and then I’ll get a ride back on a skidoo into Whitehorse.”

So he started walking. About a kilometre down the road, his legs weren’t feeling so bad. So he decided to run a bit more. Five kilometres turned into 10, 10 into 25. He thought of hamburgers and hot food, of a warm bed in a hotel at the end of the trail. He kept on running. Before he knew it, he had not only finished the race. He had won it.

He decided then and there that he would become a runner.

And that is what he did. He spent the next three years running races around the world, including several in Africa.

“I ended up entering a race in the Sahara. I fell in love with the people and the terrain. I thought there was something about it that felt very comfortable to me. It was a place I loved and a place that I wanted to keep going back to rediscover.”

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