The first thing on Jenn Laidlaw’s mind while she’s helping a horse give birth is the time of day, because going to bed after 3:30 in the morning sucks. In fact, it feels worse than just staying up, so she doesn’t bother going back to bed at all. The horse emerges, preferably led by a head and two legs, and its life and Laidlaw’s day both start at around the same time. Two hours later, the foal can stand, and Laidlaw’s probably back to tending to any of the other dozens of mares she cares for.

Next month, Laidlaw is tackling the Mongol Derby, the longest horse race in the world. Racers cover over 600 miles of Mongolia in 10 days or less, swapping out stocky Mongolian horses provided by families along the way every 20 miles or so, from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. every day. It’s a grueling reenactment of Genghis Khan’s own, centuries-old version of the Pony Express, a mail system that could supposedly get a letter from the Mongol capital to modern-day Poland in less than 12 days. Now, riders pay upwards of $20,000 to complete the route, and sometimes as many as half of them quit before the race is over. 

Laidlaw is, by her own admission, not much of a rider. She mainly works on the managerial side of operations at the horse farm in central Kentucky she runs. She breeds studs, some of them very successful; Code of Honor, a horse she helped raise, took second at the Kentucky Derby in 2019, and plenty sell for more than a house’s down payment.

A Fieldbrook native, Laidlaw, 39, just never kicked the common childhood fascination with horses, and that’s the furthest she can explain the obsession. She raised pigs and sheep for the Future Farmers of America and 4H (“My dad called them ‘expensive lawn ornaments,’ which they actually are”) and showed them at the county fair in Ferndale. During predawn staging sessions, she could sneak away for a minute and groom the racehorses. It made her mom mad, but Laidlaw thought it worthwhile. Watching the horses race stoked the interest, and when she graduated from McKinleyville High School in 2004, she decided she’d study equine science at the University of Kentucky. In horse racing, that’s where the money is. 

She’s pretty sure she’s the first person from Humboldt to race the Mongol Derby. Growing up in one-road Fieldbrook, she didn’t know how large the world was.

“I just want people to know you can do anything you want to do,” Laidlaw said in an interview with the Outpost. “And, yeah, I’m sure that there’s crazy little horse girls still up in Humboldt, so maybe they can see this and then want to go do something similar.”

She now oversees a farm with 50-something mares. She once had a horse of her own, but sold it a few years back.

“I do not have the stomach for that much invested in something that can die,” Laidlaw said. “I’m just not into it, you know? I’d rather spend the money on going to Mongolia, I guess.”

The race is a true epic — it’s easy to imagine a Hollywood studio in the ‘50s pouring tens of millions into a film about plucky vagabonds battling the elements and navigating strange, new foreign societies while racing flat-out into the hinterlands. It would be shot in Technicolor and have a runtime of three and a half hours, overture and intermission not included. 

Riders cannot weigh more than 187 pounds dressed to ride to avoid hurting the horses, and that includes the mandatory helmet, boots, and snazzy form-fitting jodhpurs. The rest of their luggage has to clock in at less than 11 pounds, and that includes everything besides water. The Mongolian horses provided stand between 12-14 hands high, and though many of them were bred to be racehorses, some of the stock are workers who do whatever task is asked of them.

“Anyone who mistakenly calls them ‘ponies’ will rescind the judgement after riding these diminutive powerhouses,” the race website reads. “These are the same hardy beasts that carried the Mongol warriors over half the world…Accustomed to heat, cold, hunger, thirst, flies, floods, deserts and really anything else that Mongolian mother nature can throw at them, they can cross terrain that would make a thoroughbred weep and maintain speeds that would put them in contention in many a tough endurance ride.”

It’ll be the first time Laidlaw has traveled to Mongolia, though she’s thought about competing in the Derby since 2012. Her roommate at the time completed it, and her blog and social media posts during the race impressed Laidlaw. Blog posts and photos from the race’s media people affected her as well; Laidlaw said their live streams, interviews, and the beautiful shots of riders adventuring in the Mongolian countryside was incredible enough to make her want to go for it. 

But mainly Laidlaw needs an adventure, a getaway from a job with actual life-or-death responsibilities (“People say they have bad days at work all the time. I’m, like, ‘Did something die?’ And if the answer is no, I’m, like, ‘Did you really have a bad day at work then?’”) and a recent past marked by the death of her dog and her grandmother. 

“I keep joking that my life this year is like a country song,” Laidlaw said. “My wife hasn’t left me yet because” — she laughed — “I don’t have one. I can kind of joke about it now, but it’s been hard.”

Going to Mongolia and riding horses unlike any she’s ever raised from one nomad family to the next for 10 days just kind of happens to be the way she’s decided to have the adventure. She applied to compete in 2023, and in a brilliant stroke of fate, learned she was in the same day she received a job offer. 

“There was a lot of ‘Yes’ that day,” Laidlaw said. “…It was a good day. And, you know, ‘Hello! You need to choose one or the other.’ I’m like, ‘Nah, we’ll just do ‘em both. I’ve got two years to get ready. I’ll be fine. It’ll be fine. And those two years have gone by really fast. Really fast!”

Laidlaw hasn’t prepared the way she would have liked to. She’s never done an ultra-endurance ride before; most of her horse riding experience comes down to the occasional lesson and infrequent jaunt back when she owned her horse. She’s done a little bit of training on the farm with a “semi-feral” horse that flipped on top of her, dragged her across a wall, and stepped on her the last time she rode him, supplemented with spin bike classes and doses of manual labor. Still, she’s not that concerned about the probability of failure. 

“From what I’ve been told, you can never really be prepared,” Laidlaw said. “Being fit mentally is probably the hardest part, from what I’ve heard, and I’m pretty sure I’ll be OK. [I’ve] been through enough. I’ve done a lot of crazy things. My job really revolves around these kind of things. There are so many kinds of situations where I’m like ‘I don’t know if I can. I’m exhausted. I don’t know if I can keep going.’ And somehow, you’re, just, like, ‘I have to keep going. I have to show up again, and we’re just going to keep doing this.’

“And I think that’s part of the reason I’m going,” she continued. “I just kind of want to test myself again — not again, but just in a different way. More of a personal challenge, because I know I can do it. I just want to prove it to myself.”