by Dion Leonard
I’ve spent a couple of days running like that in Morocco, and I’ve been fortunate enough to compete in a heap of other races too. Every time I’m one of the front runners, whether there are choppers overhead or nothing but damp-looking volunteers sheltering from the Scottish weather, the high stays with me for days afterward.
In fact, I don’t even have to be in first place to get my winjunkie fix. I’m also a realist, and I know that I’m never going to win a race like the Marathon des Sables. Those top-ten slots are the preserve of the most gifted endurance runners on the planet. I’m just a hobby runner who came to the sport late in life after a decade of life as a fat bloke stuck on the couch. Against professional athletes who have spent their lives running, the odds are never in my favour.
That means I must set my goals carefully. At an event where the best in the world are running, winning, for me, is a top-twenty finish. The buzz I’d get from finishing that high up the table at Marathon des Sables would be every bit as sweet as an Atacama gold spot.
I’m thankful that in the few years I’ve been running, I’ve become well acquainted with the highs of my sport. I also know the lows, and there’s nothing I hate more than being unable to compete. Being injured to the point where I can’t move as quickly as I think I should really kills me. Being overtaken by people I know I’m faster than hurts like a knife in my heart. Being so down on myself that I choose to stop and bail on a race entirely, as I did on my very first ultra, is about as bad as it gets.
Those experiences can leave me feeling drained and depressed. I get angry with myself and frustrated to the point of wanting to throw it all away. In those times I’m not much fun to be around.
Searching for Gobi on the hot summer streets of Urumqi, I could feel the crash coming. I could tell it was going to be a big one.
I’d been on a high since finishing second in the Gobi Desert race. Part of that was the success of the run, part was the continued success in my training, and a whole lot of it was thanks to the excitement about bringing Gobi home. As soon as she went missing, I kicked into action mode—first working out how to find her, then how to tell the supporters, then how to get myself out to Urumqi to join in the search. Life had been frantically busy right from the moment of that dreaded phone call, and I’d not had a chance to stop.
All that changed once I arrived in Urumqi. When I woke up for the first time in the hotel, the reality of the situation finally caught up with me. I was convinced all was lost.
I knew I needed to put on a brave face for the rest of the search team, so when Lu Xin came to collect me soon after breakfast, I put on my sunglasses and my biggest smile and tried to pretend that everything was fine.
We spent the morning resuming our poster campaign, working systematically along the streets and putting a poster on the windscreen of every parked car that we could see. More often than not, if we returned to the street an hour or two later, we’d find all the posters removed and piled up in a rubbish bin.
We had a couple of arguments with the guys whose job it was to keep the streets clean. The first time it happened, the old man wouldn’t listen to Lu Xin’s attempts at an explanation. The second time it was the doctor who stepped up. She faced off with another old guy, and this one was putting his heart and soul into the shouting. Flecks of spit were flying from his mouth as he ripped up a handful of the posters that he’d swiped from the first few cars. The doctor got up in his face, shouting just as loud. They were both speaking so fast that I didn’t bother asking Lil to translate, but I could tell the doctor was refusing to back down.
Eventually she won. The old man took a good hard look at me, put up his hands, and backed away. The doctor’s performance was as much of a surprise to the others as it was to me, and we all stood, staring in awe when she turned back towards us.
That was about the only good moment of the day. The rest of the time I spent trying not to let my thoughts spiral away from me. It was almost impossible. All it would take would be a glimpse of the mountains in the distance, and I would worry that Gobi had tried to head back to the kind of terrain with which she was familiar.
Midway through the afternoon there was another flurry of activity as news of a possible sighting came in. Someone had sent a picture this time, and it was clear to me that the dog looked nothing like Gobi. I was all for giving it a miss, but the rest of the team wanted to check it out. After the previous day’s letdown, I was surprised the team was still so positive.
The dog wasn’t anything like Gobi, of course, and I went back and sat in the car as soon as I could. I probably looked as though I was desperate to keep going, and, in a way, I was. But all I really wanted was just a moment’s rest. Wearing the fake smile was killing me.
By the time Lu Xin returned me to the hotel, it was late at night. We’d got rid of thousands of posters along miles and miles of parked cars. We’d argued with street cleaners, begged with shopkeepers, and seen countless drivers return to their cars and throw the posters to the ground without even looking at them. I had not eaten since breakfast, was still jet-lagged, and was told that the hotel restaurant had already shut down for the night.
I ordered some room service, took a drink from the minibar, and tried calling Lucja. No reply. So I waited some more and took another drink. Then another.
When Lucja called back, a great surge of sadness flowed out of me, like water down a drain after the plug is pulled after a bath. I couldn’t talk for a minute or more. All I could do was cry.
When I finally caught my breath and wiped my face, Lucja had some news for me. She’d been e-mailing Kiki since I left Edinburgh, and they’d both agreed that with me in Urumqi now, we needed to do all we could to get the local media to cover the story. She had spent a lot of the day getting in touch with outlets, and after a lot of communication difficulties, she had arranged for one of them to come and interview me the next day.
“It’s just a local TV show,” she said. “It’s not much, but it’s a start. Maybe it’ll kick things off, like the Daily Mirror article did.”
“I hope so,” I said. We both knew my heart wasn’t in it.
“Hey,” she added. “Someone on Facebook said that you need to make sure those posters aren’t just in Chinese but are also in whatever language the Uighur read. You’ve done that, haven’t you?”
“No,” I sighed, eyeing another drink. “Lucja, this whole thing’s impossible. If she went farther into the city, there’s traffic everywhere and great packs of stray dogs that would probably rip her to pieces. If Gobi went out to the mountains, she could be a hundred miles away by now, and even if we could somehow know what direction she went in, there are no roads to follow. All we’ve done is hand out posters, and now we find out that none of the locals can read them. We’re finished even before we’ve begun.”
Lucja knows me well enough to let me rant a while longer. Only when I’d run out of words did she speak again. “You know what I’m going to say, don’t you?”
I did. But I wanted to hear her say it anyway.
“Sleep on it. It’ll all look different in the morning.”
For once Lucja was wrong. I didn’t wake up feeling optimistic, and we didn’t have any breakthroughs as we continued the search in the morning. We went through the usual routine of distributing posters, getting into arguments, and dealing with the depressing sight of those mountains in the distance.
There was one difference, however: the search team was now considerably bigger. Along with Lu Xin, Lil, the hairdresser, and the doctor, many others had now joined our team. At one point, later during the search, I counted fifty people, twenty of whom chose to search all through the night while I was sleeping. They were remarkable people, and I could never thank them enough.
Doing the TV interview in the hotel later was a good idea. It reminded me of the surge of interest that we’d had back when the fund-raising kicked off. I’d not done any interviews since Gobi had gone missing, mainly by choice. With no news to share, there didn
’t seem to be much point.
The local TV station was different. The reporter wanted to know why a guy from Scotland would come all the way to this city to search for a dog, and he seemed to like the fact that the search was being led by locals.
Whatever the station did with the story, it worked. The next day we had two new volunteers join the search and more than a dozen requests for interviews from Chinese TV stations and newspapers. Just like the Daily Mirror and BBC coverage back home, that first Chinese TV interview had gone viral, unlocking interest from all over the country. One TV station even sent a crew along to follow me for a two-hour live broadcast of the search out on the streets.
Not all the attention was positive. Lu Xin took a call from a woman who claimed she had seen Gobi in a vision and that Gobi was running through snow-capped mountains. I dismissed it out of hand, but I could tell that a few of the searchers were interested.
So I said, “Tell her if she’s any good at having these visions, she needs to have one that has a bit more detail in it. We need to know exactly which one of these mountains Gobi is in.”
I knew nobody was going to get the joke.
The following day the new posters arrived, with the message in both Chinese and whatever version of Arabic the Uighur use. We got the same disinterested reaction from people, but at least the media interest continued to rise.
People started coming up to me on the street wanting to have their photo taken. My lack of Chinese and their lack of English meant we’d hardly ever be able to talk much, but they all seemed to have heard about Gobi and wanted to take a few posters with them. Every time that happened, I reminded myself that if this all worked out right, it was only going to take one poster to do it.
Along with the Chinese media, the international outlets started to get interested again. Lucja had worked the phone hard at home, and after a day’s searching in the streets, I’d get back to the hotel and speak to journalists and producers in the UK and the US. It meant staying up late and not getting much sleep, but it was a whole lot better than sitting around feeling powerless and depressed.
Ever since I arrived in Urumqi, I’d been relying on Lu Xin and her team. We had no offers of help from the authorities or other organizations. We were on our own—that much was clear.
Over the years a lot of people have told me that—given the way my childhood turned sour—they are surprised I’m not messed up. I tell them my childhood contained some hardship, but it also gave me the tools I needed to survive. All that pain and loss gave me a certain kind of toughness, and running gave me the chance to put it to good use. Pain, doubt, fear. I discovered that I’m good at blocking them all out when I’m running. It’s as though I have a switch I can flip on or off at will.
I use that blocking ability at work too. I don’t give up when it looks like all is lost, and I won’t take no for an answer. That mental toughness I learned as a kid has helped me in many ways. I’m grateful for it. But losing Gobi was a shock. It taught me that I’m not as tough as I think.
After everything she had done to stick with me, I couldn’t just forget about her. I couldn’t flip the switch and move on. I couldn’t stop myself from fearing the worst, from doubting our chances, or from feeling the tremendous pain of knowing that—day by day—I was losing her.
16
Day four in Urumqi was almost identical to all the others. I was up at six o’clock, eating dumplings with the rest of the search team in a café in a converted shipping container. We were talking about how long Gobi had been missing: officially it had been ten days, but none of the volunteers believed that. They all thought she’d been missing for at least twice that.
A new girl joined us, Malan—bringing our number that morning up to ten. Malan told me that she had seen me on TV the night before and was so moved by the story that she contacted Lu Xin and asked if she could come along and help. She proved her worth right from the start, suggesting we distribute the Uighur-language version of the poster in a nearby Uighur neighbourhood.
The homes were all single storey, a patchwork of loose bricks and rusted metal roofs. Every other street we’d been down had been wide and clean and lined with cars parked on the side. This Uighur neighbourhood had narrow, twisting alleys, few cars, and a lot of goats caged up in spaces not much bigger than a hotel bathroom.
I wondered if this was the first time in the Uighur part of town for the Han Chinese members of the search party. If it was, they didn’t show it. They just got on with the job of putting posters into as many hands as was physically possible.
The only difference in the day came in the afternoon when Lu Xin left me at the hotel to do another interview while she drove to the airport to pick up Richard, my tent mate from the Gobi race. He lived in Hong Kong, and his work took him all over China. He and I had kept in touch since the race, and he’d been a generous supporter of the Bring Gobi Home fund-raising. When he found out that he was going to be a short flight away from me in Urumqi, he offered to come and help with the search for a few days.
I was excited about having a friend come and join me, and the fact that Richard was fluent in Mandarin was another bonus. I was also looking forward to being able to run. Ever since arriving in Urumqi, I’d ambled around the streets at the same tortoise-slow pace as the rest of the search team. I’d tried getting them to pick it up a bit, but it was no use.
Richard and I went for a run in a park near the hotel as soon as he came back from the airport. I’d had my eye on the mountains all along and had seen several villages in the scrubland that separated the city from the hills. I wanted Richard to help me cover some miles and hand out a bunch of posters among the locals up there.
Richard had other plans. I didn’t know it at the time, but Lucja had been in touch with him already, asking him to look after me because she knew I was stressed and not eating properly.
After the run, we met up with the team. Lu Xin looked anxious as Lil told me about a few phone calls she’d taken. That was nothing new. The more posters we’d hand out, the more calls we’d get. Mostly they were false alarms, but sometimes they were from people asking if we would increase the reward if they brought Gobi in. They were time wasters, and after the first few, Lu Xin stopped telling me about them.
These calls were different. I could tell she was hiding something. I pressed her to tell me what was going on.
“Just someone being bad,” she said. But I wasn’t satisfied.
“Tell me. I want to know.”
“Lu Xin took a call this afternoon. They said that Gobi is going to be killed.”
At first I didn’t get it, but as the news sank in, I felt sick. If this was a joke, it was despicable. If it was real, I was terrified.
I’d calmed down a bit by the time I returned to the hotel, but the interview with BBC Radio later that evening was a bit of a disaster. I was feeling particularly hopeless and depressed about the search, and even though I knew how important it was to sound upbeat and positive, to make it clear that this was not a hopeless case, I failed. I was exhausted, worried, and unable to see how we could ever hope to find Gobi. It was not my finest media hour.
Even though I’d been feeling so flat, I’d wanted to do the interview because of a piece that had appeared in the Huffington Post two days earlier. Under the headline “Missing Marathon Dog Gobi May Have Been Snatched by Dog Meat Thieves”, the piece quoted someone from Humane Society International who said that it was “very worrying that Gobi has gone missing in China, where between 10 and 20 million dogs are killed each year for the dog meat trade”.1 From everything that Lu Xin had told me, the dog meat trade was not common in the region we were in, especially given the large number of Muslim Uighur who lived there. There was no way they would ever eat a dog, which they considered to be as unfit for human consumption as a pig.
Not only was the piece inaccurate, but it was also not helpful. We had our small band of dog lovers joining in the search, but we needed the local and national Chinese media to c
over the story and help convince the wider population in the city to care about a little dog. Chris and Kiki had already advised me to stay positive and never say anything critical of the state while I was being interviewed, and I knew that if the authorities felt that the story was being used by the Western media to paint the Chinese as dog-eating barbarians, I’d lose all hope of ever getting their help again.
The truth was that the local search team had been great. I wanted to tell the BBC and all the supporters back home what amazing support we’d received from the general public as well as the authorities. I wanted to make it perfectly clear that everyone I’d met had been helpful, kind, and generous. I couldn’t have asked for more from the team, the Chinese media, and Kiki back in Beijing. Even if we never found Gobi, their support had been phenomenal.
That’s what I wanted to tell the BBC that night. Instead, I sounded as though I was ready to end it all.
Richard rescued the situation with a few beers and a good meal. We talked about things that had nothing to do with Gobi or the search, and Richard told me he was a former US marine. He wouldn’t tell me any more than that, although when the conversation did return to Gobi, he had some interesting theories on what had happened to her.
“None of this adds up,” he said. “Even without those calls, it still looks wrong to me. I don’t think it’s got anything to do with Nurali being in the US or her father-in-law accidentally letting her escape. I think that the moment Gobi’s story went viral and the fund-raising kicked in, someone spotted a chance to make some money. That’s all this is about, Dion—money. This is a shakedown. The call will come.”