Racing to the Finish Read online

  BATTLEGROUND OF THE MIND

  July 2016

  Dirty Mo Acres, Mooresville, North Carolina

  I want to tell you about Amy Earnhardt.

  It was the summer of 2016, and at that time she was still Amy Reimann, my fiancée. And because of everything that I was dealing with, it was easy for us to forget that we were also in the middle of planning a wedding, scheduled for New Year’s Eve.

  As my time out of the racecar was extended, and as rumors about my retirement started getting louder, a lot of people spoke up. They had a very hard time dealing with it all. I’m referring to a not-small percentage of my fans but also to some people who are much closer to me. Some, as close to me as people can get. The thought of me not doing my job . . . well, it made them very emotional and, in a lot of cases, irrational. They looked for something or someone to blame.

  So this is for anyone who tried—and might still try—to blame Amy. The people who said stuff like, “Well, she doesn’t want him to race, so that’s why he’s getting out of the car” or “Getting engaged to her has made him soft” or “I bet while the doctors won’t let him race, she’s at home trying to talk him out of ever coming back.”

  Do you want to know who was setting the alarm every morning and dragging my miserable butt out of bed to do my exercises? Amy. You want to know who set up my gym in our garage and then went in there every day, putting me through my paces like a personal trainer-turned-drill-sergeant for two or three hours a day? Amy. It was Amy who recorded video of my exercises in case Micky or Dr. Petty needed to see them. It was Amy who stood behind me catching that medicine ball and tossing it back, over and over and over again. Amy put up with my whining and complaining. Amy listened to my rambling hours of self-analysis of how my body and brain were feeling and functioning. Amy took the brunt of my temper tantrums on the days when my condition left me no control over my emotions. Amy drove me everywhere. Amy put her shoulder under me when I lost my balance and she caught me when I fell down.

  This is the guy she was living with that July.

  Wednesday July 20: real wobbly balance and sight in the morning. Feel like my muscles aren’t getting the message from my brain. Haven’t started training yet. Will do this evening. Went to hospital for blood work and felt so damn drunk and wobbly. Just incredibly debilitated.

  Felt better as we got to noon. Did my exercises. Hard but got through it. Got Amy on a Bosu ball with feet together and eyes closed and she gets my exact symptoms.

  Thursday: Woke up wobbly but not quite as bad. Vision seems to have a 5% to 10% improvement in steadiness at distance. Still bouncy eyes riding in a car. No nausea. Taking the meds. Don’t feel the amount of wobbly I had waking up yesterday but it’s still very much there. Worked out. Got some headache on the physical stuff. More wobbly with each physical workout.

  Around 7 p.m. I got real wobbly and felt slow mentally. Not foggy. Just lazy mentally.

  Amy was by my side for everything. She was at every doctor’s appointment, from Charlotte to Pittsburgh. Whenever any news was delivered by those doctors she was there to hear it, the first to either celebrate with me over the good news or hold my hand and calm me down for the bad news. When people, including family, didn’t understand what was happening and couldn’t understand why I didn’t just shake it off and get back to the racetrack, it was Amy who had to try and explain to them how bad off I really was. That’s a hard conversation, especially when you are explaining it to people who grew up in that “put a washcloth on it” mentality.

  You want to know how many times she said, “Dale, I think you need to quit driving racecars”? Zero. Not once. We had conversations about whether or not I should keep driving, but when we did they were started by me. There were a couple of times when I would say I was 90 percent sure I was done as a racecar driver. There were other times when I would put that number closer to 50 percent. On other days it might be 0 percent. No matter what percentage I was sitting on, Amy was going to leave the decision up to me—and she made sure I was doing my exercises, no matter where my head was.

  Being the spouse of a racecar driver, even a healthy one, is a tough experience, especially for someone who didn’t grow up around racing. But if someone really loves you, then they also appreciate the things that you love. Amy knew from the very beginning that I loved racing. She was never going to be the person to get in the way of that, even during the times when racing didn’t love me back.

  Friday: Felt like this morning was the best morning physically, with balance and eyes. Saw improvement in rehab. Eye chart, gait test, ball toss.

  Saturday and Sunday, more the same. I have a new way to describe what my eyes do. When I move my head left to right, objects move left to right in the opposite direction.

  Monday: Not a great day. Went to see TJ Majors and played video games and went to lunch. Really struggling with balance and eyes. So disappointing. The day sucked all around. Went to basketball and eyes went nuts. My reaction time is off, and I’m just not coordinated. Very drunk feeling.

  Annoyed at the lack of progress.

  Being out of the racecar again was sad, but when I’d been told it would be another couple of weeks, I never felt crushed by that news. It still felt temporary. I figured, okay, I’m missing two more races, so three in total? That’s only one more than we missed in 2012, and we’ll come back for the road course at Watkins Glen and it’ll all be good. Besides, my car was in good hands. I personally pushed for Alex Bowman and they’d given him a shot. In addition, Rick had somehow talked Jeff Gordon into coming out of retirement to run the next two races, the Brickyard 400 and the Pennsylvania 400 at Pocono. Jeff Gordon? That’s a pretty insane substitute driver. I was blown away. (“What can I say?” Rick told me later. “I’m a heckuva salesman.”)

  My team was taken care of. My businesses were taken care of. Everyone told me it was time to take care of myself for a couple of weeks. And again, as scary as being diagnosed with a concussion might be, it felt good to have a goal. Every time I visited the doctors in Pittsburgh, they would fill out two very important lines in their appointment notes: a short-term functional goal and a long-term functional goal. During my rehab, the short-term goals changed. But the long-term goal was always the same: “Return to racing.”

  The problem was, as is so apparent in my notes, that I wasn’t making progress toward that goal nearly as fast as I had in 2012. I knew I was in much worse shape now, but I still believed the recovery time was going to be relatively short. My rehab then had lasted barely a week. Now, entering the second week after my first 2016 appointment with Micky, it was becoming obvious that this was going to take a while.

  Tuesday. Awful balance. No good. May be wrong but feel like I may be falling to the left most often. Especially in the gait exercise. Wobbly all day. Played games on my computer.

  Wednesday and Thursday very similar days. Better balance but terrible gaze stabilization.

  Friday. Balance a little worse as is gaze stabilization than the past couple days. Noticed my energy not as sustainable.

  Last several days no changes. Becoming more worried with eye issue not improving. Seeing symptoms get a little worse at night getting tired at 7/8 pm. Ready for bed earlier than normal. Sleeping harder and deeper than normal. Workouts slightly do increase balance issues.

  Tuesday, August 2, 2016

  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania

  I was back to see Micky, having stuck to my exercise plan and confident that there had been improvement. But now I had a new, growing problem. Okay, it wasn’t new, but it was the one aspect of my condition that seemed to be getting worse instead of better. You read it in my notes. My eyes now felt like they had a total inability to stay locked in on an object. I had learned that this is called gaze stabilization, and the title accurately describes the problem. Whenever I tried to focus on anything up ahead, especially if I was in motion, my eyeballs would just start bouncing around, like they were on springs, each one doing whatever it wanted all on its
own. I had heard other racecar drivers, like ESPN analyst Ricky Craven, describe that kind of sensation after suffering concussions, but it always sounded a little crazy to me. Now I knew exactly what that felt like.

  For the vestibular system to properly do its job of helping us maintain balance, making sure our head, eyes, and body are in sync, the communication lines between all of those parts has to be clear. My stretched, bent, and snapped communication lines weren’t providing a clear path. Not yet. It would be like going into an airplane and cutting the wires that connect the gyroscopes to your attitude, heading, and turn indicators. More accurately, it’s like cutting those wires and then reconnecting them with a shoddy tape job so they keep coming apart and back together. There are short circuits in the systems that are supposed to tell you where you are, where to look, and where the horizon is.

  It was particularly terrible whenever I was in a car. I couldn’t even look out the window. I’d have to stare into the floorboard to keep my eyeballs from bouncing and my world from spinning out of control. That’s a horrible condition for anyone. For a racecar driver, it’s just about the scariest scenario you could come up with.

  Micky explained that a lot of my fatigue was tied to this issue. The gaze stability center is located in our brain stem, uses a ton of energy, and can become tired very easily. Most people probably think of the brain as this organ that’s just sitting there in our skulls, not moving or pumping or anything like that, so it doesn’t use as much energy as something like our muscles or hearts. But the reality is that it uses far more energy than any other part of our anatomy. It burns calories. It uses 20 percent of the energy that the body needs, and that’s when we’re at rest. When you’re hurt, and your brain is having to work overtime just to try and do normal everyday tasks, like maintaining balance, it’s no wonder exhaustion sets in. Especially if you were already an overthinker like me.

  My gaze stabilization problems are why the second half of every Pittsburgh visit was spent with Dr. Nathan Steinhafel at Pediatric & Adult Vision Care. There I was run through a battery of eye tests, the goal being the same as it was at UPMC: to find my limits and give me a list of tasks to complete at home on top of those already given to me by Micky’s staff. It was all designed to retrain my eyes to better connect with my brain and function properly. That included updated prescriptions for my glasses, which were like orthopedic shoes for my eyes. They were big and chunky, but I was told to wear them at least 70 percent of the day, and they definitely helped. I was given computer-driven tasks on my laptop that would force my eyes to track moving objects to the point that I felt totally cross-eyed, but I could also feel the strength starting to build back up. I also had a battery of chart-driven eye tests. In one, I would stand ten feet from an eye chart and try to read it top to bottom, but also while turning my head side to side in a “no” motion and then up and down in a “yes” motion. There were a lot of variations on this, all challenging me to rapidly focus, track, and read while in some sort of motion. Man, that’s hard enough to do when everything is working right!

  So another trip to Pittsburgh, another exertion workout, another pair of glasses, and another long list of exercises to take home. This came with another “we will see you back here in two weeks,” which also meant “you still aren’t cleared to race.”

  That meant another call from Dr. Petty to Rick Hendrick and another call from Rick to Jeff Gordon and Alex Bowman. Jeff agreed to run that weekend’s race at Watkins Glen, the event I had originally eyed for my comeback. Now I wouldn’t be going at all.

  Or wait, maybe I was?

  Friday, August 5, 2016

  Watkins Glen International

  If ever there was a time when anxiety was going to cause me to overdo my self-analysis of my symptoms, it was the Friday when I wrote this note:

  Aug 4. Getting tired in middle of the day. Want to sleep very badly. Can lay down and sleep for hours. Balance seems to be slightly better. Not as woozy when sitting or standing or rolling in and out of bed. Still there but improved. Eyes not coming along as I would like. When I’m well rested the eyes seem their best. Felt like wearing my glasses bothered my eyes and distance stability more, especially before noon.

  The next day I was traveling to upstate New York to make an appearance at Watkins Glen Raceway during the NASCAR Cup Series race weekend. It would be the first I had seen anyone outside of my doctors, closest friends, and immediate family since I’d driven at Kentucky Speedway, one month earlier. It would be a quick up-and-back day trip from North Carolina, with Mike Davis and Hendrick Motorsports VP and general manager Doug Duchardt as my escorts. I wasn’t planning to visit with Greg Ives and my crew as they helped Jeff Gordon prepare for Sunday’s race. I was really self-conscious of getting in their way, of being a distraction. I had even removed myself from our group text conversations. The real purpose for the trip was to do a media Q&A session.

  I don’t think I can fully express to you how nervous I was about this visit to the racetrack. Throughout my different concussions and my different fights to battle back over the years, various symptom triggers would come and go, some worse at some times and others worse at other times. But the one constant force that would push me over the edge was being in big, crowded, overstimulating environments.

  The entire time I was away from the racetrack in 2016, the biggest challenges for me were whenever I would venture out into the world. I would be doing well with my exercises and thinking I was making a bunch of progress, and then I would go to the grocery store with Amy and it was like a nightmare. I’d walk the aisle of the store and the lights were bright and the aisles would feel narrow and I would have to physically catch myself. I’d feel like I was about to fall over on my face right there in the store. That made me paranoid about the people watching me. People are always watching me anyway, especially around my hometown of Mooresville, North Carolina, but now when they were watching me it would feel like it did at that barbecue place in Kansas City after my big 2012 test crash. It felt like they were judging me all the time, sizing me up. “I was just reading about all Dale Junior’s concussions, and dang, look, he can’t even walk straight through the produce aisle!”

  My security blanket was my couch at home. Whether I was stumbling through a workout or freaking out at the grocery store, if I could just get back to my couch, then I knew I would be okay. That was the one place in the world where I could even feel the tiniest bit normal. Only a few people in the world had access to my den—well, them and our dogs. I called it my charging station. Like an iPhone, just let me plug in and recharge and get my energy back up.

  Now we were headed to the racetrack, maybe the most overstimulated environment in the world. It’s crowded, loud, covered in color, and there’s no place on earth where more people are staring at my every move all the time. So why in the world would I go there? Because Micky said I had to. I had my exertion exercises to push my limits at home. Now he stressed the importance of exposure exercises, to push my limits well outside the comfort zone of the house. He said it was particularly important for me to get back into my regular work environment, to remind my brain of how it operated in the garage area. People who suffer physical injuries, they have to reteach their healing parts how to do the jobs those parts used to take for granted. I had to do that with my brain.

  Doug and Mike both remember that I was very quiet on the trip up to the Glen, even more than usual. It took about a half-hour to ride from the airport to the track, and during that time I finally spoke up. I told them they really needed to keep an eye on me. I was worried how I was going to look in front of the national media for the first time, and then how I might look to the fans watching at home. All those worries that kept me from revealing my first concussions were the same reason I was worried now. I remembered how people reacted to Ernie Irvan, Steve Park, and Ricky Craven when they’d returned from head injuries. They had all suffered from the same eye issues I had now, but that was years earlier and none of them had receive
d the kind of advanced treatment that I was getting from Pittsburgh. They had “lazy”-looking eyes and slightly slurred speech. Even after Ernie and Steve came back to win races at NASCAR’s highest level, they were still given the “damaged goods” treatment. I was worried I might not be able to recall a word or maybe I would talk a little slower than I had before. It was hard for me to see the differences in me now versus me earlier in the summer, but these folks who hadn’t seen me since then, they’d notice anything different and they’d notice it quickly.

  Honestly, I was just worried that I was going to lose my balance and fall down trying to walk up to the front of the media center with all those cameras rolling.

  I didn’t. All things considered, I thought I handled the thirty-minute press conference pretty well. I was asked about the work I was doing to return. “Racecar drivers don’t have much patience to begin with . . . so it’s frustrating . . . We’re just taking it one appointment at a time.” I was asked what I’d learned during my time away and I admitted that I’d made a mistake multiple times by hiding how I felt. I also admitted that if I was twenty-one years old instead of forty-one, I might still be tempted to ignore concussion symptoms and keep racing, but I wanted the young guys to know that was the wrong move. I confessed that my rehabilitation was taking much longer than I had expected. I also confessed that I was still confused as to how all of this had even happened, with no single giant origin hit to trace it back to like we could to the Kansas tire test in 2012.

  I think that for the fans who were watching, maybe they were hoping for a bunch of ironclad answers like, “This is what happened and I’m back to this percentage of being okay and I will be back for this race on this date!” That’s not what they got. But I was as honest as I possibly could have been.

  Mostly, I was asked about when I thought I would return and if I thought there was a chance that I might not return. Nate Ryan, then with USA Today (now my coworker at NBC Sports), mentioned my career accomplishments and all my good fortune in the sport and wondered if that might be something I had weighed at all, you know, about “it,” “a decision,” “if it came to that.”