It was the second day of a 155-mile race through China when a small dog decided to befriend ultramarathoner Dion Leonard. That friendship would prove to change Leonard's life, he tells Inside Edition Digital.
It was in the middle of the Gobi Desert where an unexpected friend entered ultramarathon runner Dion Leonard's life.
It was the second day of a 155-mile race through China when a small dog decided to befriend him. "A little dog comes out of nowhere, starts running the race, and then decides to join me in the week-long race as well," Leonard tells Inside Edition Digital.
Over the course of this grueling seven-day race, runners carried all of their food and gear on their backs. On the second day of the race, Leonard says he saw a little dog with sharp teeth chewing on the covers.
"Now I'm calling out to everyone, 'OK, whose dog is this? Someone come and get this dog away from me, because the race is about to start.' But as I call out, the gun also goes off to start the race and all the runners go running down the trail ahead of me and I'm stuck there with this pesky dog attached to my legs," he says.
"Out of the 101 people that start the race and all of the other volunteers and people around the race, she decided that I was the one for her," Leonard says.
With a determination to win the race, the little dog's presence was sometimes a hindrance. "At one point, I can take the lead of the race or I can go back and help the dog across a water crossing," Leonard remembers. "I'm about to take the lead of the race when I hear her barking, yelping and whining behind me. She knows if she goes in the water, it's rushing so fast that she's going to get washed away, she's going to drown, she's going to die."
Leonard calls that split-second decision to go back for the dog life-changing. "When I pick her up, have her in my arms, carrying her across the water, I look at her and realize, this is pretty incredible," he says. "Maybe we were meant to be friends for a little bit longer than I first thought too."
By the time the race was over, Leonard and the dog he named Gobi, after the desert where she found him, were in love. Leonard says he saw a bit of himself in the canine. "I'd had a really difficult, depressive, abusive childhood," he says. "I see this dog no one cares about, we don't know where she's come from, what she's doing out there, but she certainly had a pretty tough life herself."
It seemed like fate. "Here I was, meeting her out in the desert, these two lost souls perhaps were meant to meet out there," he says.
But bringing Gobi back to Leonard's then-home in Scotland proved to be difficult. She needed medical tests and clearance in order to leave China for her new home in the UK.
Gobi was left with a friend who promised to care for her during that process, but after Leonard returned home, he received a call that Gobi had gotten lost.
"I'm devastated, heartbroken," he says. "Think to myself, well, I'm never going to see her again unless I do something about it. I got on the first plane back to China, flew back out to Urumqi and started looking for the dog."
Without speaking the language, Leonard organized a team of volunteers who printed flyers and canvassed the local area. The reward for Gobi's return caught the attention of potential scammers. "People then started to ring up and say, 'We know that you have more money to offer.' They were threatening to kidnap me if I didn't pay them some of the money that we had," Leonard says.
Despite setbacks, Leonard was determined to find Gobi. "I think a lot of it comes back to me thinking that I saw something in myself in the dog, and I wanted someone to be there for me when I was growing up and to offer support and love and kindness," Leonard says. "Something that I wanted to do for the dog was be that person for her."
After 10 days in China, and weeks after Gobi had gone missing, Leonard was reunited with his racing pup. Leonard recalls the moment they saw each other again. "She comes running towards me, jumps up in my arms. Yea, I knew straight away that it was Gobi," he says. "So, it was an incredible moment. I'm in tears, the search and volunteer team that were there are all in tears."
During the time she had been missing, Gobi was hit by a car. She needed surgery, or vets said she risked losing her leg. For over four months, Leonard stayed in China while Gobi recovered.
The time, Leonard says, was spent "getting to know each other, getting to fall in love with each other more."
Once she was well and able to be moved to Scotland, Gobi adjusted to life with Leonard, his wife Lucja, and their cat, Lara. "I really do think she's an angel, because she has brought so much joy and light to many people's lives," he says. "Not just ours, but all around the world as well."
Leonard says running changed his health, his life and gave him the opportunity to meet his furry best friend. Surprisingly, he says, "I don't particularly like running, it's not my favorite sport. It's not something that I really enjoy going out to do. It just turned out that it was good for me, and turned out that I was good at running as well."
Leonard's ultramarathon career started as a drunken bet with friends. He wagered a friend that he would beat him in a half marathon. Half marathons are 13.1 miles, a distance Leonard had never run before. After the bet, Leonard recalls, "I woke up the next day, forgotten about the bet that I'd made, and then my wife told me what had happened the night before and how ridiculous I'd been. I thought, 'I wonder how far I can run.' I got outside, tried to run around the block, couldn't make it around the block. I had a lot of work to do in the next few months to get ready for the race against him."
There were several reasons why a half marathon seemed out of the question for Leonard. At the time he smoked a pack of cigarettes each day, was a heavy drinker and was overweight. Those vices helped him cope with the effects of a difficult childhood.
"It all turned out from this one bet that I'd made with my friend, that actually running was really good for me, not only physically, but also mentally as well," Leonard says. The passion for running grew from half marathons to ultramarathons.
"An ultra runner is one that runs further than the traditional marathon distance of 26.2 miles," Leonard explains. "So, it could be 50 miles. A lot of the races that I run are 100 miles, sometimes 150 miles. I'm now running races that are over 200 miles nonstop."
Leonard is still racing and plans to go back to China, the same place he found his beloved dog, for a 250-mile ultramarathon. As for Gobi, she's become a sideline cheerleader. "Gobi retired from long-distance running after that race in the desert. She still loves to go on adventures," he says.
Adopting Gobi has made Leonard "a much softer, kinder, better person," he says.
"I think going back and helping her across the water in that moment when I could take the lead of the race or go back and help her, is the moment that I realized winning isn't everything, and I don't need to prove to people what I can and can't do," he says. "Picking her up and having her in my arms, it really was a moment when I felt love for something else, rather than a lot of anger and resentment towards life and things that had happened in the past as well."
Leonard's book, "Finding Gobi," chronicles their journey together.
"She's changed my life probably in more ways than I've changed hers," he says.
