Distance-running dog turns into a touring literary figure
NEW YORK — As dog stories go, this one about a scruffy little stray named Gobi has legs — for miles.
The sand-colored pooch with big, soulful eyes has a book out and a movie deal after she happened upon ultra-runner Dion Leonard last year during a 155-mile race across desert dunes, over mountains and through yurt villages in the remote autonomous region of Xinjiang in northwestern China.
Gobi kept pace with Leonard for nearly 80 miles in 100-plus-degree heat, forever securing a spot in his heart.
Still, the dog-choosesman, man-saves-dog story doesn’t end there.
While the Australianborn human returned home to Edinburgh, Scotland, to figure out how to adopt a stray dog from China and get her into the United Kingdom, Gobi disappeared from the home of a person in the race community whom Leonard had met during the multistage, seven-day event.
The acquaintance had agreed to temporarily shelter the dog as Leonard untangled the red tape.
Gobi’s disappearance led Leonard to hustle back to China to join a search for the dog in the densely populated city of Urumqi, where street cleaners disposed of their reward posters about as fast as the searchers could plaster them on lampposts, cars and shop windows.
Looming over the search was fear that nearly $50,000 raised for Gobi’s cause through crowd-funding, attracting media attention in the United Kingdom and China, might have created a “dognapping” scenario. About 10 days after Gobi disappeared, she was found. Man and dog were reunited, but Gobi had suffered a hip injury and a deep head gash.
Together, they waited out 90 days of quarantine in a dank Beijing apartment before arriving in January in Scotland.
So what made Gobi — named by Leonard for the desert where they met — choose the Aussie?
“That is the milliondollar question,” Leonard, 42, said during a recent interview. “I wish she could tell me because I get asked that quite a lot, and I think about it quite a lot. ... It was definitely fate, and I’m so glad that she chose me.”
It was second day of the race when Gobi sought out the lanky Leonard, who still seems genuinely baffled by it all. He marvels at Gobi’s ease crossing the Tian Shan mountain range and the distance she covered during the race. He arranged for comfortable car transport for Gobi from checkpoint to checkpoint after her unbelievable stretch on foot.
Dog safely nestled in man’s arms, the two beamed at the finish line, medals on red sashes around both their necks, after Leonard finished second.
“Me being able to help Gobi through the race and actually be the person who could step up and take her out of the situation she was in was something I was really wanting to do because those were the sort of things I needed when I was younger, and no one was there for me to do that,” Leonard said, referring to his tough early life in the country town of Warwick in the Australian state of Queensland.
The straight- laced, churchgoing, familyfocused place didn’t take kindly to the crumbling of his home life when he was 9. That’s when Garry, the man he called Dad, died, and Leonard’s mother revealed that Garry wasn’t, in fact, his biological father.
The revelation, and the sight of Garry falling fatally ill, sapped his mother emotionally and turned them into outsiders. Leonard left home at 14, choosing to take a shot at life alone.
“I was living in pubs, hostels, caravans,” he recalled. “It was pretty grim. I was trying to go to school, and I was trying to work as well because I didn’t have any money. I use the negative energy of my childhood and my upbringing, which was very volatile and depressing and an abusive situation, to drive me forward during a race.”
Leonard has been happily married for a decade-plus.
“There are always those demons in the basement that you think you’ve dealt with,” he said, “and when I go to these races, I deal with them, and I don’t think about those things at any other time.”
With Gobi settled into Edinburgh life, having made friends with the rescue cat that Leonard and his wife own, life is busy for man and dog. They’re on a book tour for “Finding Gobi”, out this month along with youngadult and picture-book versions.
Their story has been sold to 21st Century Fox for a movie, and Leonard had enough crowd-funded Gobi money left over to donate $10,000 to an animalrescue and adoption group in Beijing, the Little Adoption Shop — whose founder, Christopher Barden, helped him secure Gobi.
Leonard will also donate a portion of his book and movie proceeds.
“Animal welfare in China isn’t governed by anyone, and they’re all desperately dying for donations,” he said. “There are so many stray dogs; it’s really sad.”
“Finding Gobi” (Thomas Nelson, 272 pages, $16.99) by Dion Leonard