The Graveyard Shift. Late night and early morning are spooky, in-between times, when most people are resting, not working. I've never been good at staying up late (I never pulled an all-nighter in college and, for years, I've welcomed in the New Year in North Carolina when the clock strikes midnight in Australia), so I've been curious about what staying up all night is like. I'm no longer curious.

My team started the graveyard shift (9 PM to 3 AM) the evening of June 18th. Current popular explanations for the origin of the phrase “graveyard shift” reference the 19th century problem of accidentally burying people who were still alive. To prevent this from happening, the story goes, caskets were equipped with a bell-ringing device, enabling a waking “corpse” to notify the world that he or she was no longer dead. The graveyard attendants, who remained vigilant throughout the day and night to un-bury the only slightly dead, worked the graveyard shift. As an aside, I'm intrigued by the idea of an entire industry being built around accidental burial and deliberate resurrection. Do you suppose a degree in raising the not-really-dead was offered in the 19th century?

Sadly, further research indicates this explanation is merely a story and nothing more. The “graveyard shift” is an evocative term for a night shift that occurs between about midnight and eight in the morning, when -- no matter how often you've worked it -- your skin is clammy, there's grit behind your eyeballs, and the world is creepily silent, like a graveyard. The phrase dates only from the early years of the twentieth century, presumably when the need for factory shift work first originated.

I didn't hate the graveyard shift. The nights were cool, the streets free of traffic, and the sky clear, black, and full of stars. Most scary things were asleep; I was ignored equally by sober porcupines and drunk Czech guys.

I didn't love the graveyard shift. The hills started with our first runs in the Czech Republic. Because the road ahead was completely dark (no street lights in most places), the tail lights of the departing van appeared to rise directly into the sky. Where was I running to exactly, Mars? And I was constantly clammy, gritty, and creepy. Like a graveyard. The kind with the not-quite-dead-yet people.

We ran through Czech, Austria, Czech again, and Poland during this shift. Our day off was in a small town outside Krakow. I spent the morning after our last run sleeping like the dead and then I took a hot, hot, hot shower to wash off the clam, grit, and creep. The steam sealed me into the shower stall and, until the bathroom cooled off, I was stuck. Stuck in a Polish shower. Surely, there's a joke here.

We're on the way to the Polish-Belarus border. We'll be ferried across on a bus, transferred into team vans, and then my team will start running as the sun is coming up. Belarus, for the first time, seems like alien territory. Although, rationally, the terrain in Belarus is likely similar to that in Poland, I keep expecting it to be dramatically different. Purple trees and dinosaurs, perhaps, like Land of the Lost. Cats and dogs living together. Mass hysteria. The great, and therefore terrifying, unknown.

We'll be running at dawn into this great unknown, which seems appropriate. We'll run out of the half-light, out of the graveyard, and into a bright, new part of the world. Shiny.