I have been sleepless for the past four nights. Sleepless in Belarus. Poetic on paper, but pretty horrible in reality.

After crossing from Poland into Belarus on June 22nd, we started the 3:00 AM to 9:00 AM shift the morning of the 23rd at the Belarus border. Ordinarily, this shift isn't too much of a hardship for me; I really do prefer running early in the morning. This time around, though, I've been battling a persistent bout of insomnia. Maybe I'm hyper-vigilant because, for the first time, people are staring as the team arrives and departs. Maybe I'm off-balance because Belarus is the first truly strange place I've traveled; I recognize approximately five letters in the 34-letter Cyrillic alphabet – the written and spoken language are equally impenetrable to me. Maybe the fact that the sun doesn't set until 11 PM is messing with some ingrained bio-rhythym. Or maybe – darn it – I just can't sleep.

Belarus is a study in contrasts. Buildings look sad, slumped and gray, like tired old men. The countryside, though, is vast and rich and marvelous. If one sleepless night changes perceptions, four sleepless nights change perceptions dramatically. By the end of my stay in Belarus, city centers looked dingier and more depressed, but everything outside the urban areas looked clean and fresh and sharp. Fields of wheat rippled like green and gold water. Tiny pink-and-yellow painted villages sprang out of nowhere in the middle of a stretch of road, like clusters of brightly colored mushrooms. Ancient and wicked-looking farm equipment stopped and posed along the roadside, quaint and picturesque. Somehow, a lone runner clutching a baton and disappearing into the distance seemed to fit perfectly into this landscape.

Like I said, though, poetry doesn't always translate well. When the lone runner disappearing into the distance is me, well, the picture isn't quite as pretty. After four nights with minimal sleep, I took an awful long time to disappear into anywhere. In fact, at times, I think I was running in place. I started to feel really sorry for the police escort assigned to follow all the runners through Belarus. One poor guy had to watch the back of my sweaty black shorts as I trudged along a country road lined on both sides with an unbroken and apparently endless wheat field. He stalled the car several times; my theory is my running bored him nearly to death.

My team crossed the Belarus/Russian border at around 1 AM on June 26th – our last night on the night shift for a while. I was bracing myself for a long wait (and possibly a short snooze) at border control, like we'd experienced in Czech, Poland, and Belarus, but we essentially got waved through. So, I starting running on time, at 3 AM (bleh). My run was uneventful – it started and ended on a long, featureless road that but for the mysterious Cyrillic lettering could have been in North Carolina – except that I was once again attacked by an inanimate object (first a rock in Ireland, then nettles in France, then a rose bush in Germany, and now a construction barrier in Russia). Fear not -- I escaped with only a bruise on my shin!

I'm finally feeling sleepy. I'll miss my super-sharp perception, but I'm looking forward to being coherent again (I've drifted off to sleep in the car only to wake up a few moments later yelling “France! Are we in France?? No? Why not?!”). I'd like to stop scaring my teammates!