By: Kara Fini

The story of Gobi is a story of a dog who ran 77 miles of an ultra marathon in the Gobi Desert of north-central China back in 2015. She is a small female chihuahua who ran with the runner Dion Leonard. Dion Leonard is from Edinburgh, Scotland and traveled to China to race one of the toughest races in his life.

On day two of Dion’s race a little stray dog started to follow him and run alongside him. It annoyed him at first, but his attitude changed on day three. Right before he was about to take the lead, there was a huge water crossing he had to wade through. He started going through the water, but heard whimpering behind him, so doing something he had never done before, he turned back and carried the dog across. After that day his main priority changed from winning the race, to protecting and running with Gobi.

When the race ended, Dion asked to see if anyone was her owner, but when no one claimed her he decided he wanted to take her home to Scotland. Because of policies that stopped Dion from just taking her, he went back to Scotland and left Gobi with a local family who offered to take her.

After a few weeks apart Dion got heartbreaking news that Gobi went missing. Dion was heartbroken, and decided to fly to China to start a rescue team to try and find her. They set up posters and searched everywhere. By this time, the story of Gobi and Dion had gone viral in this area so many people were wanting to try and help find Gobi.

Dion wasn’t convinced that Gobi had just escaped and thought that someone would take her because of how viral she had become. He started to lose hope when someone claimed to have found her, but it was the wrong dog.

Then one day, a person on Dion’s search team came up to him and showed him a picture of a dog that people had sent to him thinking it was Gobi. Dion glanced at it, but was not convinced that this was Gobi. He decided to go and meet with them anyway. They got there and as soon as the dog saw Dion it came sprinting towards him. It leaped into his arms and Dion knew that it was Gobi.

They spent a couple months living in Beijing while Gobi was waiting for the necessary paperwork, so she could go to Scotland with Dion.

She now lives there full time with Dion and his wife. She is retired from running, but they travel the world to inspire others to run.

If you want to hear more about Gobi’s story, Dion wrote a memoir called ‘Finding Gobi’ where he talks about his whole experience in running with Gobi and the journey to take her back to Scotland.