credit: David Andersen with The Plain Dealer

American Katie Spotz has put her body through more trials and tests than your average 22-year-old: She swam the entire 352 miles of the Allegheny River; she biked the 3,300 miles from Seattle to Washington, D.C. in forty days; she ran 150 miles across the Mojave Desert; she ran a 62-mile marathon in Melbourne, Australia.

And now, she plans to row across the Atlantic Ocean to become the youngest and first American to row from Africa to South America. She’ll be at sea, rowing for 70 to 100 to complete the 2,500-mile trip from Dakar, Senegal to Cayenne, French Guiana.

But this particular challenge isn’t just about world records: Spotz is making the trip to draw attention to the need for safe, clean drinking water all over the world. The athlete is being sponsored by Blue Planet Run Foundation, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that works on safe drinking water projects.

On her website, www.rowforwater.com, Spotz says she got the idea from someone she met randomly in Australia. For the duration of the trip, Spotz will blog about her progress from her little boat. Some of the technology in the yellow “house on the water” includes an EPIRB (Emergency Position Indicating Radio Beacon), which she calls her emergency button. She will also have about 100 audio books loaded in her iPod, along with podcasts including comedy routines from Dane Cook.

A sports psychologist who has worked with Spotz, Dr Jack J Lesyk, compares her discipline to that of astronauts. “She’s really focused on all the details of properly preparing herself, and she’s doing it entirely on her own,” Lesyk told The New York Times.

Discipline or no, Spotz’s success is by no means guaranteed: Although more than 100 attempts to cross the Atlantic have been made in the last nine years, about half of them have failed to complete the test, the Ocean Rowing Society says.