Runners up: GPS company sponsors trek across the Sahara.

EVER hear the one about the American, the Canadian and the Chinese guy who decided to run across the Sahara? And the global positioning company that sponsored them?

The punchline: It's a true story.

Magellan GPS, the San Dimas division of Santa Clara-based Magellan Navigation Inc., provided several hundred thousand dollars and the handheld navigational systems for the trio--Charlie Engle of Hermosa Beach, Ray Zahab of Canada, and Kevin Lin of Taiwan. Their 4,300-mile trot, at a clip of about 40 miles a day, will be the subject of a documentary, "Running the Sahara," produced by L.A.-based Live Planet.

Angela Linsey-Jackson, the public relations manager of consumer products for Magellan, said the company signed on to the 111-day adventure that ended in February as a means to show off the power of its global positioning gear.

"We did it to help people accomplish a seemingly impossible goal through the use of GPS and funding and further awareness about a great cause," she said.

Engle is supporting H20 Africa Foundation, which is pushing for water programs in the Sahara.

Magellan has sponsored other outdoor exploration projects, including the National Boy Scout Jamboree, and Care Camps, a Campgrounds of America event for children with cancer and their families, LinseyJackson said.

Navigation for the Sahara run was challenging.

"Most of the time there were no roads, there were no maps," said Larry Tanz, chief executive of Live Planet. "It was just a giant open desert with sand dunes, dusty landscape, tracks going in all directions. We would just call up the satellite points and type them into the Magellan. You would see nothing; you're just following this point on the device. And suddenly you look up and you are there."

Engle and Zahab crafted the idea while on a run two years ago.

"It was one of those really bad ideas," Engle said. "We wanted to do it because it had never been done before."

One of the first things Engle did was contact Magellan to find out what kind of equipment he would need, he said. He had previously owned a Magellan GPS.

"I knew it was a natural company to ask to become involved in a project like this," he said. "I had to have the GPS aspect to even scout the trip, to do routing, to plan the actual direction I was going to take. When you are in the Sahara, you might as well be in the middle of the ocean. You aren't going to just happen upon something."

The documentary crew members, who carried Magellan's GPS, came and went at different points in the project and had to navigate from the nearest airport to a remote point in the desert.

At one point, several crew members flew into the city of Agadez in Niger. They typed in the runners' coordinates and drove six hours into the desert before everyone in the car fell asleep, including the local driver they'd hired. The car rolled to a stop on the sand.

"The driver pops up and acts like he wasn't actually sleeping. He starts up the car and keeps driving," Tanz said.

The production manager eventually pulled out his Magellan and realized he had made a U-turn and was heading in the wrong direction.

"He pointed it out to the driver and the guy looks at him like, 'I have lived here for 40 years.' But the GPS was right," said Tanz.