“Perhaps she ran off looking for me, and that’s why she left where she was,” he explains. Leonard was devastated, and so were Gobi’s new fans. The escape came just after a crowdfunding campaign for Gobi’s adoption expenses turned her into a viral sensation. Unfortunately, Gobi escaped her foster home not long after Leonard settled back into life in the UK with his wife, Lucja, and the couple’s Ragdoll cat, Lara.

Gobi initially stayed with a local woman while Leonard went home to Edinburgh to start an adoption process that would take months. When the ultra-marathon ended, Leonard had a new family member, but adopting a dog internationally is no simple matter. “I realized I could be the person who goes back there and helps her and changes her life, when no one actually did that for me when I was younger.” (Picture Credit: until this point Leonard’s race superstitions had prevented him from looking behind him to check on the dog, but suddenly he knew he couldn’t leave her behind.”

Only Gobi knows why she fell for Leonard, but he knows the exact moment he began to return her feelings - as she tagged along with him for the second day in a row. Perhaps the little dog sensed Leonard knew what it was like to feel alone and unloved after an upbringing he describes as volatile and filled with loss. Out of the hundreds of runners at the starting line for the second stage, Leonard was perhaps the least likely to share a post-run meal with the pooch, but he was the one she choose. A serious athlete, he was in it to win - not to make friends with some random dog. Having come to running later in life, Leonard didn’t have time in his career for a fun run. In a competition where every calorie counts, food is precious - and Leonard could hardly believe it when he saw his fellow runners feed bits of their own precious rations to the stray the night before.

The grueling, multi-day sport sees runners take on treacherous terrain while carrying all their supplies on their back. (Picture Credit: commitment to Leonard began as he embarked on the second stage of the ultra marathon.

Gobi dog book