Getting Back to My Roots

The past couple weeks, I have talked about skateboarding, snowboarding, BMX, and have talked with some of the local extreme sports enthusiasts including Brandon Smith and Christian Anderson. Throughout the last couple months of blogging for the Patch, I have failed to actually let people in on why exactly I am here blogging in the first place and what prompted me to start Emerald Pacific. It wasn't the skateboarding, snowboarding, or any of the sports that I have talked about so far that brought me here, it was actually the sport that I started when I was around 12 years old. That sport would be auto racing.

This past weekend, me and the family were able to get back out and do what we love to do: racing the late model down at South Sound Speedway. The last time we were out at South Sound racing was back in August 2010. We ended the season on a bad note since on the last lap of that exact race I was racing a competitor for 4th position and got tagged in my right rear quarter panel and T-boned a concrete barrier which sent me to the hospital for an overnight visit. So to be able to come back out to the track and take in the atmosphere of racing once more was a refreshing experience for me. There were a group of kids at the tracks walking around asking for autographs, other competitors were dusting off from the off season, and I was trying to get back into my own groove. Throughout the day, I was able to finally give some thought into what the point of being involved in a sport was all about. While some people may be taking their sport seriously or taking each game/race/competition with stride, the ultimate point of being involved in a sport is to have fun and enjoy your time practicing your sport.

Back through the beginning of my racing career, me and my family took racing very seriously. We were doing whatever it took to try to get to a higher discipline of racing within a short amount of time. We called the Courier-Herald to try to get myself notified, we participated in several national events including the Red Bull Driver Search and the IKF Grand Nationals , and practically lived and breathed racing. Back in 2005, as far as we were concerned, we felt we had a legitimate chance at possibly making it to NASCAR and we were not going to let anything get in our way of making it to the big leagues. It was an ambitious and respectable goal, but we let our sport run our lives to the point to where we were not having fun anymore and we treated a sport, that was meant as a recreational activity for the fun of the sport, as a full-time job. Allowing our sport to run our lives started to yield disappointment when we wouldn’t do well and started to tear us apart when something didn’t go our way. Now that I have had time to get away and take a good honest reflection, I have realized what the point of practicing a sport is: having a fun time with your family and friends doing what you love to do.

It’s good to have a goal when getting into a sport. Not only is it important to have fun but to also attempt to improve on character and getting to know yourself through your sport as you slowly improve over time. That is part of a fundamental objective that I have brought into Emerald Pacific that I try to remind the athletes from time to time. The worse thing that can possibly happen is to get too serious about a sport and start making yourself hate the sport that you used to love. The point isn’t to force yourself but to improve upon character. Once the day comes that an athlete starts turning their favorite sport into a full time job and forces themselves to try to get somewhere, that is the day that it is time to take a step back and try to reevaluate the primary reason that got them into their sport to begin with.