Battling bouts of illness and dehydration, exhaustion and bruising falls, she decided she had nothing to lose. She raced for ten days through extreme heat and terrifying storms, catching a few hours of sleep where she could at the homes of nomadic families. She was driven by her own restlessness, stubbornness, and a lifelong love of horses. Riders often spend years preparing to compete in the Mongol Derby, a course that re-creates the horse messenger system developed by Genghis Khan, and many fail to finish. As she boarded a plane to East Asia, she was utterly unprepared for what awaited her. On a whim, she decided to enter the race. At the age of nineteen, Lara Prior-Palmer discovered a website devoted to “the world’s longest, toughest horse race”―an annual competition of endurance and skill that involves dozens of riders racing a series of twenty-five wild ponies across 1,000 kilometers of Mongolian grassland.
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