I Entered the Longest Horse Race on Earth at 52 Years Old: 1,000 Kilometers Across Mongolia on 25 Half-Wild Horses. On Day Six, I Had to Choose Between Winning and a Stranger

The first horse threw me in four seconds.

The second horse bit me.

The third one ran eleven kilometers in the wrong direction before I could turn her around, while a herder on a motorcycle followed us, laughing so hard he nearly crashed.

Welcome to Mongolia.

I’m Bennett Crane. I’m 52, I raise cattle in the Nebraska Sandhills, and I have been riding horses since before I could walk. I’ve roped calves, broken colts and moved herds through blizzards.

I thought I was a horseman.

The horses of Mongolia had other opinions.

The race is a thousand kilometers across the steppe, following the old horse-relay system of Genghis Khan. Every forty kilometers, you reach a station run by a herder family and swap to a fresh horse. Twenty-five horses. Ten days. No roads, no fences, no trail. Just a GPS, a map, a sleeping bag and whatever the weather wants to do to you.

Forty-five riders started. Most of them were half my age.

Why was I there?

Because my son Tyler signed me up.

He’s twenty-six, works for a tech company in Denver, and when my divorce went through last year, he said, “Dad, you’ve done the same thing every day for thirty years. Go do something stupid.”

He even bought me the medical evacuation insurance the race requires. “Just in case,” he said.

I laughed at him.

By day six, I was in third place.

And at 4 p.m., in a cold rain on an empty plain sixty kilometers from the next station, I found a rider lying in the grass beside her horse.

She wasn’t moving.