Illustration by Arthur James

Welcome to the tailgate party at talladega super-speedway—a mini city of RVs, barbecues, budweiser banners and 150,000 rabid fans. What better place for an outdoor junkie to go for a run?

The National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing—that is, NASCAR—claims 75 million fans, which adds up to approximately one out of every one white male Southern redneck. And while I happen to be white, and male, and born in Georgia, and my nape does indeed turn crimson after a day in the sun, I have never included myself among that 75 million.

My notion of an ideal weekend is to get as far away from the motorized world as possible—on a backcountry ski trip, say, or a long mountain bike ride. Yet as an observer and chronicler of all things sports-related, I felt as though I couldn’t ignore NASCAR much longer. Every event in the league’s 36-week season draws more spectators to the stadium than the Super Bowl, a World Series game and an NBA Finals contest combined. I may be a quiet-seeking, Toyota-driving, lefty tree-hugger, but I simply had to see what the hell was going on.

I went big. I shelled out 2,000 bucks for plane fare, RV rental, race tickets and a Mark Martin beer coozy, and I made a pilgrimage to NASCAR’s largest temple, the Talladega Superspeed-way, a giant kinked oval sprawled amid the farmlands of central Alabama. The thought of witnessing a cluster of garishly painted cars make a bunch of left turns wasn’t what spurred me. Instead, I hoped to understand what electrifies these 75 million people. I went, in other words, chiefly to watch the watchers. And also to go running.

Yup. That’s what I did. I jogged around a NACSAR race. Why, you might wonder, would a person do such a thing? Well, first off, I’m something of an exercise addict, the kind who gets a little cranky if he doesn’t get his daily fix. Second, I’ve found that running is the best way to experience a new place—walking’s too slow; driving’s too insular. And third, after I checked the concession stand and realized that the healthiest item was a deep-fried turkey leg the size of a ping-pong paddle, I knew it wouldn’t hurt to burn a few calories.

So I left the RV I was sharing with my brother-in-law Chad (it was his first race as well) and began to jog. Essentially, Chad and I were living in the middle of a city. It was a temporary city, to be sure—one that exists only two weekends a year—but a city nonetheless, population about 150,000, complete with a downtown district, a shopping area, a half-dozen distinct suburbs and a massive zone of uncontrolled urban blight.

We’d reserved a spot in what was supposed to be a semi-quiet suburb. Really it was just a grassy field crosshatched with dirt roads, the whole place crammed with RVs and campers. I’d probably have gotten a better night’s sleep if I’d pitched a tent in the median of an interstate. Though the temperature was just about perfect, it seemed that nearly everyone around us needed to run their generators all day and all night. For heat? For air conditioning? I had no idea. Maybe, I theorized, rather than the sounds of bubbling rivers or bugling elk—the background noises I most like to hear when I’m camping—for this crowd, nothing is more soothing than the roar of 10 dozen engines.

No matter where I ran, the drone of the generators stayed with me, as if I were being pursued by a swarm of bees. More unsettling, however, were the advertisements. Basically, NASCAR is one giant corporate commercial. If there’s a square millimeter of Talladega City from which an enormous logo can’t be spotted—for a beer, a power tool, or an auto-parts store—I’d like someone to show me. As I trotted the streets of my little suburb, I noted that several people had voluntarily added to the corporate presence by hanging banners or flags on their RVs advertising things like The Home Depot and Budweiser.

My neighbors were not paid to do this. Rather, they’d shelled out their own cash for the opportunity to contribute to the marketing efforts of multibillion-dollar companies. Are Home Depot and Budweiser really in such deep financial trouble that they need volunteer marketers?
I pondered this thought as I exited my suburb and turned onto a paved road leading to more suburbs with more Budweiser banners. Along the road was a chain-link fence. And within this fence, pushed into the diamond-shaped openings between the links, were crushed beer cans. They weren’t randomly placed—they formed words and patterns, somewhat like a giant LiteBrite. I’d say a good 10 cases of beer were used to spell, in 3-foot-high letters, “GO JUNIOR!”

Junior, in case you’re a NACSAR neophyte, is Dale Earnhardt, Jr., son of the legendary Dale Earnhardt, who was killed in a race in Daytona, Florida, in 2001. Junior is the fan favorite at Talladega. That’s an understatement—fan obsession might be more accurate; fan demigod. Jesus first, Junior second. If that’s not already on a T-shirt somewhere, it oughta be.

Oh, one more thing: Junior’s chief sponsor is Budweiser, which, I deduced, is the real reason people hang Budweiser banners and wear Budweiser caps and Budweiser jackets and Budweiser wristwatches. Anything to foster a connection with Junior, to become a little more like Junior. Every driver, so far as I could tell, was identified with his corporate logo. The Home Depot is Tony Stewart, another much admired racer. In a way, the whole logo-fixation thing made sense. When I flipped through the Talladega souvenir program and glanced at the headshots of the drivers, every one of them looked so similar it was scary. It made me wonder if they were part of some secret cloning project. The only obvious differences were the corporate logos on their Star Trek-style racing suits.

I’d actually picked a logo myself, which was prominently displayed on the shirt I wore during my run. I was a supporter of Viagra. Why not? Viagra is Mark Martin, and supporting Viagra, I learned my first day at Talladega, was as neutral a choice as possible. Nobody hated Viagra. Viagra was a fine racer, a sort of always-a-bridesmaid-never-a-bride type fellow. Fine by me; Viagra it was. And as I jogged by, most of the Viagra fans who spotted me—there were even RVs with big Viagra flags—gave me a heartfelt, brother-to-brother cheer.

If I wanted to piss people off, I’d have rooted for DuPont. DuPont is Jeff Gordon. On my run, I spotted a pickup dragging a DuPont hat from its rear bumper. Traffic was thick in Talladega City and I easily caught up with the truck. I asked the driver what it was about DuPont that so irked him. “He’s a faggot,” I was informed. As I stood there, in my little running shorts, my politically correct, East-Coast-educated brain was so stunned by the straightforwardness of the answer that I could only mumble a weak “Well, thanks for telling me,” before the truck rumbled off.

Over the course of my run, this opinion of DuPont was proffered a half-dozen times. The calculus, so far as I could figure, was this: DuPont is from California. San Francisco is in California. And everyone in San Francisco is gay. Therefore—ta-da—DuPont is obviously a homosexual. Homosexuals, I think, are allowed to attend NASCAR races, but only those still in the closet. The only thing worse than being openly gay at Talladega, I imagine, is being openly Democrat.

I feel I’m being hard on the fans here. I don’t mean to. The fans I met at Talladega, without exception, were friendly people. So nice! When I first parked the RV, the next-door neighbors lent me some two-by-fours to stick under the tires and showed me how to level the thing out. Nearly every time I paused while running—to jot a note, to take in the view (atop one slight rise I felt, stirringly, as if I could see every RV on Earth)—I was offered a free beer. People were sitting around in lawn chairs, grilling, chatting, watching videotapes of classic races on their portable TVs. I was invited to sit and visit with all of them. There was an expansive spirit of camaraderie, of relaxation, of down-home-style fun.

This doesn’t mean that the whole thing wasn’t somewhat disturbing. It was. There’s really no getting around the fact that the crowd at Talladega was stunningly Caucasian—and this observation is coming from a guy who lives in Montana, which I’d always thought was the honkeyest spot on the planet, until I went to a NASCAR race. I guess a sport that prohibits diversity in its vehicles—only Ford, Chevy and Dodge cars (that is, only pure-blooded American cars) are allowed in NASCAR’s main events—really isn’t attempting to garner much diversity fan-wise.

After I ran through the Talladega suburbs, I trotted into a long tunnel and emerged in the stadium itself, where cars were practicing or qualifying or something for the big Sunday race. I stopped and watched for a few minutes. The whole point of a stock car, it seemed, was to provoke a jarring cacophony of noise and speed and color. To my untrained eye, there didn’t seem much to look at, though there was a certain aspect—the utter lack of subtlety, perhaps—that was kind of cool. And this was just practice; I hadn’t even seen a real race. (The next day, I did, 500 miles worth. It was loud. There were crashes. DuPont, the gay guy, won.)

The stadium’s infield, the area encircled by the 2.66-mile track, was Talladega’s equivalent of the Upper East Side, home to the wealthiest fans. There was even a gated community in the infield, the epicenter of Talladega City, where the million-dollar motor homes of the drivers themselves were parked. And it was near this gated community, at the vast garage complex, that I got to see an actual driver.

The way it happened was that I came across a young man wearing a Home Depot jacket and a Home Depot hat, waving frantically at a guy on the other side of the fence. The person on the far side of the fence, the young man assured me, was none other than Mr. Home Depot himself. Depot passed within three feet of us—by this point, we were both waving—and kept right on walking, without so much as a glancing our way.

“He didn’t say hello,” I noted.

“I saw him yesterday, too,” the young man said.

“Did he say anything then?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Has he ever said anything to you?”

“No,” he said. “I heard he’s sort of an ass.”

“But you still like him?”

“Kinda.”

For the final stretch of my run, I made my way to the farthest reaches of the race grounds, to the so-called Free Park section, Talladega’s version of housing projects. The defining characteristic of the Free Park section, as far as I could tell, was an obsession with women’s breasts. Don’t get me wrong: I love breasts. But here it was downright weird.

There were the usual roving packs of men asking (and sometimes demanding) women to display their bosoms, and feting those who complied with strands of cheap plastic beads, à la Mardi Gras. But I also noted, as I jogged, no fewer than three plywood contraptions that looked like punishment stocks from the Old West, except the holes cut into them were not for heads or hands. Instead, women were supposed to squeeze their breasts through, so they could be prodded and measured by the nearby men. I never saw one in use, though the proprietors of the stocks insisted that they received frequent volunteers.

It was in Free Park, though, that I met Quentin. I was jogging by an encampment that had a sign offering free shots of Jägermeister to anyone interested, and, for some unknown reason—I’ve never particularly liked the drink—I was interested. So I stopped. And had a shot of Jägermeister. Then another. It was Quentin who served me the shots, and he and I soon fell into conversation. We switched to beers, sat in his lawn chairs, and chatted. Quentin’s the co-owner of a company that installs cell-phone towers, and he talked to me at length about his business.

There was nothing extraordinary about the conversation, and maybe that’s why I enjoyed it so much—that, and the swirl of alcohol working through my bloodstream. I guess I just needed a moment of semi-normalcy. Not that getting drunk during a run is normal, but still, something about hanging out in Quentin’s camp brought me down from my high horse. Sure, I thought, NASCAR’s a stupid sport. But what sport, really, is any less stupid? By the time I’d finished visiting with Quentin, I was incapable of running. So I walked back to my RV, unenlightened for the most part yet no longer perturbed by the generators, and even able to see some beauty in the deep, soulful red of the Budweiser signs.