The Beginning of the End, Part II

I went through my photos from the IMSA weekend as I prepared my previous post about Road America and was astonished at the lack of compelling images I had. At first, this puzzled me because in the back of my head I was recounting a few interesting shots, but the more I thought about it, the clearer the picture got. The shots I was thinking of were from the SRO weekend two weeks later.

That’s when it all started to make sense: of course my IMSA work from RA was lacking. I could fall back on “The IMSA weekend was my first time at Road America, so I was just learning the track”... but that’s an absolute shit excuse. I buried the pain of a phone call I received Thursday night rather than trying to work through it. At the time, I thought this was the best option to save face, but in hindsight, all it did was derail the trajectory of my weekend further.

The defining moment that would shape the rest of my season (and in all honesty, probably my career going forward) came not long after the lowest point of the IMSA weekend. I was slumped over pouting on the back of the hauler when he came up to me, placed his hand on my shoulder, and said in an enthusiastic yet stern tone “If you can’t handle disappointment, you shouldn’t be in motorsports”. Although it would take the rest of the season for those words to really sink in, they are the reason I made the smartest decision of my entire weekend the next morning. I removed myself from a situation I didn’t want to be in and walked out of the photo room to surround myself with “my” team, “my people”. I was doing so to escape the pain I both knew I was feeling and that which hadn’t set in yet.

I shot myself in the foot before I even boarded the mid-west-bound plane as I simultaneously donned an unflattering cloak of loftiness. I limped through the weekend in denial of my self-imposed injuries, constantly snagging myself on anything in my way. That cloak started to unravel on the drive from Elkhart Lake to Chicago and by the time I boarded the flight home early the next morning, I was grasping at threads to hold it together rather than just letting it go. I should have just let it go.

To be Continued . . . .