I Drove Go Karts And Now Have No Doubt in My Mind That Race Car Drivers Are Athletes

On Saturday I spent an hour or so racing go karts. One of those special go kart racing tracks. And I did not expect it to be one of the hardest things in the history of things that I didn’t expect to be hard but was. I thought it would be tons of fun and like real life Mario Kart. I thought it’d be Luigi’s Raceway and Moo Moo Farm, but it ended up being Banshee Boardwalk. After the first race I was completely winded. The constant turning and the quick breaking/accelerating/breaking/accelerating was about 100 times more difficult than I expected it to be. It turns out you have to constantly have your head on a god damn swivel or else you’ll go crashing into the wall or be T boned. There’s no fun to be had. It was eat or be eaten. Slip up on the gas pedal for half a second and be passed by some jabroni. Take a turn wrong and it turns into bumper cars.

Each race we did was 15 laps. At the end of each race I wanted to douse myself in an ice bath. So now I fully, 100% believe NASCAR drivers are athletes. Jimmy Johnson might be the best athlete on Earth. That shit takes a toll on you. You have to be mentally sharp to drive at the speeds they are driving, figuring out that exact balance needed to go fast as fuck while not pile driving your neck into the walls. I have so much newfound respect for race car drivers now. And they have to drive manually. Nuts. Driving is hard. My back has me feeling like I’m 80 years old. Driving cars was a full fledged cardio work out that this blogger was not prepared for.