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As cars are tuned up, drivers get toned up
NASCAR shuns its gluttonous past as more drivers embrace fitness and conditioning.
Date published: 4/30/2006
By JIM McCONNELL Twenty-five years ago, most NASCAR drivers didn't know "six-pack abs" from a six-pack of Budweiser. Contrast that with the cover of ESPN The Magazine's February issue, on which phenom Carl Edwards posed shirtless and showed off a physique chiseled enough to make Superman jealous. Clearly, this isn't your father's NASCAR. When it comes to racing in the 21st century, fat is out and fit is in. "The commitment to fitness has changed," veteran driver Jeff Burton said. "People have started to understand that they're paid like professional athletes. They need to start acting like it." Understand, driver-as-athlete is still a fairly new concept. Many of NASCAR's earliest racers were bootleggers, whose idea of training was barreling down narrow, dimly lit back roads to avoid detection by local police. Even as recently as the 1980s, the stereotypical NASCAR driver was a Southern-bred good old boy whose athletic gifts were limited to turning wrenches and turning left. But while Edwards may be the biggest reason why that perception is changing, he wasn't the first racer to embrace the tenets of healthy living and physical fitness. That honor belongs to Mark Martin. Martin turned into a "gym rat" early in his racing career. He preferred lifting weights to drinking beer, ate broiled chicken instead of pork rinds and soon became well known as the most fit driver in the NASCAR garage. Along the way, he unwittingly served an inspiration to one of his future Roush Racing teammates. "I watched this show about how Mark works out, I was like 15 years old or something, and thought, 'Man, I can do that to be a little better,'" Edwards recently told NASCAR.com. "I thought I was in shape, but Mark Martin, at the gym the other day, he was telling me about his ab workout. That dude showed me his abs and I was like, 'There is no way I'll ever have abs like that.'" That tells you everything you need to know about Martin. At the age of 47, when many men begin to lose the battle of the bulge, the Arkansas native has become a role model for a generation of drivers half his age.
Date published: 4/30/2006
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