With a piece of meat midway to my mouth, it struck me that I hadn’t seen the dog eat a thing all day. It had run the best part of a marathon, and still it wasn’t trying to beg or steal any of the food I had in front of me.
“Here you go,” I said, tossing half the meat down onto the tarpaulin in front of it, instinct telling me that feeding by hand wasn’t a risk I wanted to take. The dog chewed, swallowed, spun around a few times, and lay down. Within seconds it was snoring, then twitching, then whimpering as it drifted deeper and deeper into sleep.
I woke up to the sound of grown men cooing like school kids.
“Ah, how cute is that?”
“Isn’t that the dog from last night? Did you hear she followed him all day?”
She. The dog had run with me all day, and I’d never thought to check what sex it was.
I opened my eyes. The dog was staring right at me, looking deeper into my eyes than I would have thought possible. I checked. They were right. It wasn’t an it. It was a she.
“Yeah,” I said to Richard and the rest of the guys. “She stuck with me all day. She’s got a good little motor on her.”
Some of the guys fed her, and again she took whatever she was given, but gently. It was almost as though she knew she was getting a good deal here and she needed to be on her best behaviour.
I told the guys I’d been wondering where she came from and that I’d guessed she’d belonged to whoever owned the yurts we’d stayed in the previous night.
“I don’t think so,” said Richard. “I heard some of the other runners say she joined them out on the dune yesterday.”
That meant she had put in almost fifty miles in two days. I was staggered.
It also meant she didn’t belong to the people back at the previous camp or to one of the race organizers.
“You know what you’ve got to do now, don’t you?” said Richard.
“What?”
“You’ve got to give her a name.”
6
I stopped running less than a mile in and cursed my stupidity.
The last twenty-four hours had brought all kinds of weather our way, from the snow and rain of the mountains to the dry heat that greeted us as we came down to camp. All night high winds had been tearing at the sides of the tent, and when I got up, the temperature was the coldest for any start yet.
The cold bothered me. I’d been looking forward to the day, knowing it was going to be flatter and hotter, but, instead, I’d found myself shivering on the start line. While the other runners went through their pre-race routines, I’d thrown off my backpack, rummaged around inside, and pulled out my light jacket, completely upsetting my usual precise and carefully prepared race start.
And now I was taking it off again. After a few minutes the sun had come out, and the temperature had started to rise. I should have been happy about it, but I could feel myself start to overheat in my wet weather gear. With five hours of hard running ahead of me, I had no choice but to stop.
As I pulled at zippers and plastic clips and shoved the jacket away, I noticed Tommy, Julian, and two others run past and reclaim the lead.
Then one more runner approached, and I smiled.
“Hey, Gobi,” I said, using the name I’d given her the night before. “You changed your mind, did you?”
She’d spent the night curled up at my side, but once I got to the start line that morning, she’d disappeared among the crowd of other runners. I’d been too focused on the weather to worry about her. Besides, if the previous twenty-four hours had taught me anything, it was that she was a determined little thing. If she had other plans for her day, who was I to stop her?
But there was Gobi, looking up at me as I fastened my bag, then down at my gaiters. She was ready to go. So was I.
I pushed hard to catch up with the leaders and was soon tucked in behind them. I knew a long stretch of the race went through a section of large boulders, and I remembered how light on his feet Julian had been when we hit similar terrain the first day. I didn’t like the thought of watching him skip away from me again, so I pushed my way up past the third and fourth runners, then overtook Julian and Tommy.
Being out in front again felt good. My legs felt strong, and my head was up. I could hear the gap between me and the other runners grow bigger with every minute that passed. I was able to run hard, and whenever I started to tire, all I needed to do was glance quickly down at Gobi. She didn’t know anything about running technique or race strategy. She didn’t even know how far I was planning on running throughout the day. She was running free, running because that was what she was made to do.
I followed the pink course markers all the way to the boulder section. The flat path I’d been on veered to the right, but the markers carried on straight ahead, through the rocks that looked big, unstable, and like they were going to make it almost impossible to keep up any kind of pace. But there was no avoiding them, and I scrambled up, feeling the smaller rocks shift and move beneath me as I went. I hoped I wasn’t going to twist an ankle, and envied Gobi’s ability to bound effortlessly over them.
I knew Julian was going to be quicker than me in this section, and as we approached the peak, I could hear him closing in behind me. But as I finally reached the top, instead of pushing ahead and trying to hold him off as long as I could, I froze.
I could see everything from up there. The checkpoint sat off in the distance, with a small village we would run through before it. I could see the way the boulder section sloped off ahead of us for another thousand feet, the pink race markers plotting the course as it returned to the flat path that led to the village, the checkpoint, and beyond.
None of that was what I was looking at.
My gaze, just like that of Julian and the other two runners who had pulled up alongside him, was firmly fixed on the solitary figure running off to the right.
It was Tommy.
“Whoa,” said Julian. “Not right.”
Tommy had somehow skipped the entire boulder section and gained a bit of time. By my calculations he’d made ten minutes on us.
All three of us were furious, but Tommy was too far ahead to hear us if we shouted. So we set off as a pack with renewed fire in our bellies, determined to catch him.
We could see Tommy at the checkpoint ahead as we ran through the village, but by the time we reached it ourselves, he had disappeared over a ridge a few hundred feet away.
I decided to pause long enough to raise the alarm and make sure someone had a record of what happened. The member of the organizing team looked at me as if I was an idiot when I first tried to explain it.
“Say that again, please?” she said.
“Tommy Chen missed that whole rocky section back there. I don’t know if he did it deliberately or not, but it’s not fair.”
“We’ll look into it later,” she said, giving me the brush-off.