Back in October, I wrote about why I'm taking a break from racing. Feel free to go back and read that article if you missed it. This week, I realized something I totally missed before, but which definitely played a part in why I felt I needed to take a break.

hobby

hob·by
/ˈhäbē/
noun

  1. an activity done regularly in one's leisure time for pleasure.
    "his hobbies are racing and mountain biking"

Somewhere along the way, racing stopped fitting that definition for me.

I don't even remember how I stumbled upon this article, but this quote really struck me:

It's understandable that in our modern-day culture of -maxxing, even hobbies turn into activities that make us feel like it's not enough to do something for the pure joy of it. But that's exactly the problem. The key to having a hobby (and enjoying it) is the low stakes of it all.

Reading that, it was hard not to see myself in it. I was treating racing and working on cars with much more obligation, almost as if they were a second job.

Steady Scope Creep

I can't really pinpoint when things changed. It must have been a slow burn. Reflecting back over the last decade:

  • Aiming for PBs during track days became...
  • Trying to set track records in Time Trials became...
  • Striving to be a top-10 GLTC driver

. . .

  • Driving a car to the track six times a year became...
  • Trailering a car to local events every month became...
  • Flying to a national series every 3 weeks

. . .

  • One spares bin became five
  • One set of wheel/tires became four
  • Three day weekends became five

. . . and so on, and so forth. You get the idea. None of these steps felt unreasonable on their own, but that's how you lose track of where you were heading.

Mental Roadblocks

Don't get me wrong, I genuinely enjoyed most race weekends. Spending time with close friends, meeting new people, and driving new tracks across the country was an incredible and memorable experience.

At some point, though, racing stopped feeling like something I got to do and started feeling like something I had to do.

It wasn't anything external forcing that change. No one was telling me I had to perform or that I needed to keep progressing. The pressure came from within.

Part of it was expectation. After investing so much time, money, and energy into racing, it started to feel like I needed to justify it. Like I owed it to myself and my supporters to keep pushing forward.

Part of it was identity. Racing wasn't just something I did anymore; it became something I felt like I had to live up to. If I showed up, I needed to be competitive. If I were there, I needed to be improving. And if I wasn't doing either of those things, then I was in some way failing myself.

These were not real pressures in a tangible sense. The self-imposed pressure was a mental construct that slowly stripped away the very thing that made racing a hobby in the first place.

Starting Over (On Purpose)

I had been on an "upward" trajectory in motorsports for over 10 years, moving from one thing to the next as opportunities presented themselves. So instead of treating this break like an ending, I'm treating it like a reset.

I haven't begun sussing out what it will take to return to this hobby, but I want to get back to the fun, carefree nature we had around 2015. The days when we'd go to a local track night, if the cars were ready, and goof around with a bunch of oddball old cars and a ragtag group of friends that got amped up about that huge slide you caught in front of them [it was a total accident, but still]. There were no expectations, but that was the beauty of it.

That thing I just described… here’s another way to understand it.

On Tuesday nights we lose any sense of self-consciousness. We might not be good at it, and we might mess up, but it doesn't matter. It's new, and we're learning!

No optimizing, no monetizing, no pressure to seek perfection. On those Tuesday nights we are completely focused and immersed in our knitting projects, but most of all, we are having fun.

And that's the sweet spot right there, at the end of the day, your hobby should make you happy, the fun is in giving yourself the freedom to find out what that is.

That's what I want racing & cars to feel like again.

Here's to my future racing being more like a Tuesday night knitting group.