I have abandoned the rush of Russia for the timelessness of Mongolia. The slower pace, the gentle language, and the quiet, traffic-free roads are a welcome change. Where Russia left me tired and nervous, Mongolia makes me relaxed and a bit drowsy.

Just over the Russia-Mongolia border, the countryside looks as clipped and manicured as a golf course. Rolling hills are carpeted with short, bright green grass and dotted with tiny, twisted trees. The roadside is lined with mats of yellow flowers, colonized by miniature powder blue butterflies. The first morning, my team encountered a leisurely herd of Bactrian (the two-humped kind) camels being driven by a guy on horseback, a huge pile of spiritual stones swathed in blue scarves, a benign and smiling Buddha, wild horses, cashmere goats, nomadic yurts...

Mongolia is paradise.

Of course, the running kind of sucked. At least for me.

By the third day of the 3 AM to 9 AM shift, the terrain had changed from arid to sere. The earth and sky were stripped of color – sandy dirt the color of unbaked cookie dough and sky like a bleached blue sheet. No trees. No cover at all, in fact. The ground was spattered with hundreds of thousands of small stones, singly and in piles, stretching to the horizon.

Welcome to the Gobi Desert.

Now, Mongolia in general, and the Gobi in particular, didn't play to my strengths. If a road is straight and marked at regular intervals with large signs with contrasting lettering, I run really well and (usually) finish where I'm supposed to. Start giving me choices and things go downhill very quickly. I have a notoriously poor sense of direction. I once left Durham, North Carolina to attend my brother's graduation from Wake Forest in Winston-Salem, North Carolina (two cities that are not far apart and are connected by a huge Interstate) and didn't realize I was headed to Virginia until I saw the “Welcome to Virginia” sign on the state line. The Gobi has a hint of a road here and a suggestion of a road there and a scratch in the sand that might be a road over yonder, which adds up to...a trackless, colorless, featureless landscape with no roads. For someone who requires large neon arrows shouting “THIS WAY!”, this was less than ideal. My run was really more of a quietly desperate slog through sand that was alternately hard-packed and ankle-deep. I kept sliding and stumbling in a direction I thought was forward, hoping I wasn't headed into some section of the inner Gobi where the camels and horses go to die.

I left a lot of unnecessary footprints in the Gobi. Sorry for the mess, Mongolia.

Okay, my run through the Gobi wasn't spectacular and I didn't distinguish myself as a graceful dune runner, but I did see the sun rise over the sand while I was busy making all my footprints. Pretty cool.