Albert Martens in Encarnacion, January 2014 (submitted photo)

"I'm looking forward to it."

That is how Albert Martens describes his next challenge. While many Steinbach residents might have yard work on the agenda for May, the sixty-six year old ultramarathon runner has set his sights on running across Paraguay.

Martens is doing this through Athletes In Action. The journey will start May 10th, in Encarnacion and end in Asuncion. Martens notes it's a journey of between 300 and 375 kilometres.

Martens won't be alone. Together with three or four other runners from Canada as well as a few from Paraguay, the team will attempt to run twenty kilometres every day over the course of at least fifteen days. The plan is to run ten kilometres in the morning and ten kilometres in the evening, with the rest of each day spent taking part in different evangelistic events. He adds the run will also help raise funds for nutrition stations for children.

"There are a lot of hungry kids, poor kids where parents are not around," notes Martens. "So these children are needy and so nutrition stations are run by different Churches." Martens will also be bringing with him one thousand colouring books for the children he comes in contact with.

Martens says the run itself will be along Highway 1, which has a fairly wide shoulder. He notes the temperature could be anywhere from 8 to 40 degrees Celsius.

"My friend in BC, he said I have friends in Paraguay, they're busy planning to import some snow for me," jokes Martens, referring to the fact it could be considerably hotter than what he's been training in. Martens, who's been running primarily on his treadmill in order to prepare, says he will amp up his training now over the last four weeks. But he says it's nutrition that has him most concerned.

"To figure out the stomach," he admits, "the food system and how to get the energy back into the stomach. The recovery time is longer for my age than it was years ago and so that will be a challenge for me to spend twenty kilometres a day on the road. And to be able to recover enough to do another twenty the next day and then the next day and then the next day."

When you look at the big picture, Martens says this pales in comparison to the longest run he's ever pulled off. Though very similar in length to his run across Switzerland which took him ten days, Martens notes the longest run he ever completed was the 1014 kilometre trek across Germany where he averaged a marathon every day.

Martens visited Paraguay in January in order to help map the route. He says though pretty, it will be a very flat course with a lot of open fields. He says they used landmarks to identify certain markers along the course, joking hopefully the same cow they used as an identification mark in January is still there in May.

Martens says residents of southeastern Manitoba can be part of his support team through thoughts and prayers.