Despite injury, Triad man competes in ‘Mongol Derby'
Today, it's very rare. But then, Fred Berry has always been a little different.
Berry is an attorney who grew up in Greensboro and didn't venture far from home for many years, attending Wake Forest University for both his undergraduate and law degrees and has practiced in the Triad since, but he's seen the world in the years since in ways most of us never will and it goes back to his younger days.
'For 35 years, I was the Huntsman for the Sedgefield Hunt Club,' he says, who first started riding when he was about 10 years old. 'And what that means is twice a week, my wife and I would load up a pack of fox hounds and a couple of thoroughbred-type horses and go to the woods and gallop around. And so that gave me the panache, if it were, to be able to ride cross country.'
That chance came when he learned about The Mongol Derby, which bills itself as the world's longest and most difficult horse race.
'It's 10 days of racing for about 12 hours a day and you pick a horse randomly off the horse line, and then if the herder can ride it, then you get on it and you ride about 25 miles to the next horse station, then you swap out and do it again and do it again and do it again,' says Berry about how the race is run.
But a few weeks before the race, Berry was out riding (and he happened to be on his wife's horse) when the horse bucked him seriously damaging his shoulder, which put him in a very difficult position.
'I was faced with do I go ahead and race with a bum shoulder or do I lay off a year and heal and be able to race fully equipped?'
He ran but it was almost impossible to compete in that condition. But, in the end, it was a trip that was worth his time and effort, though it makes a reporter wonder why a guy would travel to the other side of the world for such a difficult challenge.
'It just spoke to me,' he says. 'I've spent a lot of time in the west riding cross country, have been in California riding big, big, open land and being on a horse and being in big country is a nice thing to do for me.'
See more of Fred's journey to the Mongol Derby in this edition of The Buckley Report.
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Bob Pockrass covers NASCAR and INDYCAR for FOX Sports. He has spent decades covering motorsports, including over 30 Daytona 500s, with stints at ESPN, Sporting News, NASCAR Scene magazine and The (Daytona Beach) News-Journal. Follow him on Twitter @bobpockrass. share
