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Steamboat Springs — It should be hard for any person to wrap their mind around the expedition Will Laughlin is about to undertake.

Even the veteran ultramarathoner admits, his mind is the most worrisome thing.

Laughlin is participating in the sixth annual Wild West Relay, leaving Fort Collins early today and running to Wyoming, through Jackson County and then up, over and down Rabbit Ears Pass before arriving at Strawberry Park Elementary School sometime Saturday.

But whereas the rest of the competitors in the Wild West Relay will be on teams of six or 12, Will Laughlin will be running alone.

All 200 miles. All alone.

"My intention is to finish," Will said Wednesday, making last-minute preparations. "I want to finish in 50 hours. If it takes 60, so be it. If I show up in the middle of the night and everybody has left and my knees are bloody from crawling, great. I'm determined to finish."

Will is no stranger to ultramarathons. He's done the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon, the Gobi March 250-kilometer race in China, the Sahara Race in Egypt and the Yukon Arctic 100-mile.

He won the Yukon Arctic, finished fifth in the Sahara Race and was sixth in the Gobi March.

In each race, he battled the elements. At the Gobi he battled extreme sickness the last day that almost forced him to quit. In the Sahara he constantly ran in 130-degree weather. In the Yukon - where seven other competitors went to the hospital for frostbite - he battled 60 below zero weather.

Still, Will admits this might be his biggest challenge yet.

"It was so cold they almost canceled the race," Will said about the Yukon race. "It was very dangerous and very grueling: It was tough, but this is going to be much tougher."

Will is doing the race alone to benefit Daraja Academy of Kenya - a school that educates youths in an effort to help sustain Kenya's economy. He found out about the school when he interviewed founder Jason Doherty. He was so taken aback, Will knew he had to do something more than just put his pen to paper.

"I sat back after I did my interview and a lot of details didn't sink in until I hung up," he said. "This wasn't just a story for me, it was something I want to get involved with."

Will said if everything goes according to plan, he'll get into Steamboat Springs between 8 a.m. and noon Saturday.

He's planned out his trip, along with his five-person crew, and said they've budgeted for six hours of sleep.

He said what makes the venture even more difficult is the mental pounding he'll take. Physically, he thinks he can do it, but he said battling his mind will be the toughest thing.

Add in the terrain, and the race is really a first of its kind.

"I'm not nervous," said Beth Laughlin, Will's wife and leader of his crew. "I've watched him and been on race crews before. He knows his body, and he knows when he can push himself."

The rest of the Wild West Relay starts in waves Friday morning in Fort Collins and ends Saturday at Strawberry Park Elementary School.

The 200-mile race has two basic relay formats, one with teams of 12, with each participant running three relay legs of 5.25 miles, and the other with teams of six, divided up in three distance categories. Racers head north through the Roosevelt National Forest and briefly into Wyoming before heading back south through Jackson County, up and over Rabbit Ears Pass and onto the Yampa River Core Trail and into town before finishing at the school.

This year, there are expected to be 142 teams and more than 1,550 runners.

Only one, however, will be doing it solo.

"It's possible I don't finish, but that's part of it," Will said. "For me, it's a story. Like any good story, you don't know how it's going to end."