But, when we got to the finish, it became clear that Gobi would have to stay in China for a while.
Gobi didn’t run all of the stages with me, because it was too hot for her to do so, and I asked the organisers to help me and bring her to the stage finish. That night I named her Gobi, after the desert, and made her a promise to bring her back home with me to Edinburgh.īut, it turns out that was easier said than done, right? It was a split-second decision for me to turn around and get her, and give up any chance of winning the race, and that’s precisely what I did. There’s no way she could’ve made it across safely.
I was third at that point, and I could just see the two other guys in front of me, I jumped into the river and made it halfway across when I heard her barking and yelping from the bank.
And after a couple of days, a massive moment came when the runners had to cross a big river, 100 meters wide and with a strong current. I took care of her, fed her and made sure she was okay – mind you, it’s a race where you need to bring everything with you, food, shelter, the only thing you get at checkpoints is the water. She began to grow on me, and for her, it was obvious that she fell in love with me at that first moment. But then the dog started running next to me and keeping up with my pace (author’s note: you absolutely need to see Gobi in person to be able to fully appreciate how small she is, and how short her legs are, so, how difficult that must’ve been for her). At first, I thought that it was a distraction, I was very competitive, and hoping to win the race as it has been my return to racing after a year of recovery from an injury. On the second day of the race, I looked down and saw a small dog at my feet. It was 2016, and I was in China, in the Xinjian province, for a multi-stage (7 days, six stages, basically a marathon each day) race of around 155 miles (approximately 250 kilometres). I first asked Dion to re-tell the story of how he and Gobi met: Total Croatia News sat down for an interview with them before the main promotional event at the Hoću Knjigu megastore in the centre of Zagreb. The book became an instant hit and a New York Times bestseller with numerous editions sold around the world, so Dion, his wife Lucja, and Gobi came to Zagreb to promote the Croatian translation of the book. The love-at-first-sight story of Dion and Gobi caught the attention of numerous media portals when it was happening in 2016, and the interest led to Dion writing a book about his journey, titled Finding Gobi: The True Story of a Little Dog and an Incredible Journey. Dion Leonard is an ultra-marathoner, who went through a life-changing event while on a race in the Gobi desert, where he met and decided to adopt a stray dog he later named Gobi.
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