By the fifth day of the run, I'd abandoned semblance of personal hygiene. Right out of the gate, my team was assigned to run the 3:00 AM to 9:00 AM shift, so we were averaging about three hours of sleep a night. We would stay up all day, arrive at the hotel around 8:00 PM, check in and crash until midnight, and then wake up, repack, load the truck, and head for the exchange point in time to grab the baton from the overnight crew. After one day of schlepping a huge, heavy bag full of clothes and gear., things got very simple very quickly. I stopped showering, brushing my hair and teeth, changing clothes...I was concerned with only sleeping and running: “Rest when you can, run when you must.” became my mantra. My entire morning routine was reducing to rolling out of bed in my running clothes and chewing a stick of gum.

Nancy Fullerton ran into me in Saint Patrick's Square in Dublin. She was almost successful in not looking appalled at my disheveled appearance – and she kindly offered me the use of the shower in her hotel room. I decided to forgo lunch and eagerly scooped up an armload of clean clothes. I've never experienced such an amazing shower – like an avalanche of warm water. And the soap!! Of course, my enthusiasm was dampened slightly when a very nice Irish gentleman returned to me the pair of underwear I'd dropped in front of the hotel. At least they were clean. I now have a personal goal – I intend to leave a pair of underwear in every country I pass through. France, here I and a pair of clean underwear come.

My team ran across Ireland the morning of June 5th, through northern Wales to Shrewsbury, England on June 6th, and out of London to near Dover on June 7th. Even though getting up at midnight to prepare to run has been rough, 3 or 4 or 5 in the morning, just as the sun is rising, is an amazing time to run. Now that my team has switched to the day shift, I find I miss the solitude and strangeness of running in the middle of an empty road through a hushed landscape when saner people are sleeping. We switched to the day shift (9:00 AM to 3:00 PM) on the 7th. My first daytime jaunt was a city run in the middle of the day, which, though it offered more distraction and entertainment than a rural route, also had a lot more start and stop and start again and a lot more people to smack into and threaten with the baton. And I actually skidded on a banana peel, which I thought only happened in Three Stooges episodes, never in real life.

I didn't fall, though, so for those of you placing bets, I'm still upright after a week on the run! Ha!